A Spartacist Pamphlet $1

July 1991"~~~~$'X523 Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 2 Introduction The release of Nelson Mandela from the serving as a summary of the recent period tional Congress and other anti-apartheid or­ prison hellholes where he had spent 27 of struggle. We follow with "South Africa: ganizations under the underground condi­ years was greeted by black militants and Razor's Edge," a major article from our tions forced upon them by totalitarian re­ anti-racist fighters in South Africa and press during the critical 1984-86 years of pression, have now burst forth more openly:' throughout the world as a symbol of the the township revolts. Here we laid out the the effect of the "divestment"/sanctions impending collapse of the brutal rule of the stakes in the anti-apartheid struggle and dis­ strategy; the refurbished schemes for apartheid system. But even as the masses of cw.. sed some important aspects of the his­ "power sharing"; the question of the role black South Africans in the urban shanty­ tory and social structure of South Africa of the working class; the debate over the towns and in the impoverished townships which have shaped the confrontation be­ notion of "two-stage" revolution; the im­ were cheering his release and raising anew tween the racist police state and the masses plications for communists worldwide of the their demands for "Amandla," the debates of black working people. deepening collapse of Stalinism in the were raging with renewed intensity among The subsequent articles, reprinted in USSR and Eastern Europe. A clear under­ participants in South Africa's long and bit­ chronological order, have been selected not standing of these questions is crucial for ter freedom strugg Ie: how at last to wrest only to cover particular junctures in the creating an authentic revolutionary leader­ the real power from the apartheid butchers South African struggle, but to highlight is­ ship capable of smashing apartheid at its and open the road to the liberation of the sues and themes of particular importance: root and bringing the working class to opprc\Scd millions') To intersect the con­ history and economics, enforced segrega­ power. ccrns of these militants, as well as those tion and the "immorality" laws which In selecting these articles from among outsidc South Africa who have followed criminalized "race-mixing," the emergence the many dozens which have appeared in their struggles with sympathy, in particular of the powerful black union movement, the the Spartacist League's press, we have had black Americans who have seen in South role of U.S. imperialism. We hope that our to omit many topical articles which would Africa an intl'nsified mirror of their own readers will find these materials informa­ give a more complete picture of our con­ oppression by the racist capitalist ruling tive and compelling in presenting our Trot­ cerns throughout this turbulent period. In class of this country, we are devoting our skyist program of "permanent revolution" particular, numerous articles protesting the I <)<) I edition of Black History and the Class in South Africa: for a thoroughgoing social brutal repression and calling for defense of Stmggle to a collection of our articles on revolution under the leadership of the work­ South African anti-apartheid activists and the fight against apartheid. ing class to smash apartheid and carry workers leaders have been omitted. The title article appeared originally as a through the democratic and socialist trans­ Today, South Africa is in the news again two-part series in Workers Val/guard last formation of society. as promises are put forward by the regime, winter. along with the accompanying article In particular, this pamphlet seeks to ad­ supported by the "moderate" ANC, talking on the strike at Mercedes-Benz. This ma­ dress directly some of the main questions of a new, "post-apartheid South Africa." terial presents the characteristic revolution­ being debated by activists in South Africa Yet there can be no equality and no freedom ary outlook of the Spartacist LeaguelInter­ and their supporters abroad. These debates, for the masses who labor in the mines national Communist League, as well as which have raged within the African Na- (continued on page 42)

- Adapted from Workers Vanguard Nos. 515 and 516, 30 November and - Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 406, 20 June 1986 14 December 1990 Massive Black Strike Under Apartheid Reign ofTerror ANC, Communist Party Seek to Repackage Apartheid South Africa Showdown ...... 32 South Africa and Permanent Revolution ...... 3 -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 486, 29 September 1989 ~ Repnnted from Workers Vanguard No. 515, 30 November 1990 Black Workers Strike Against "Divestment" Mercedes-Benz South Africa Union-Busting ...... 351 Sit-Down Strikers Raise Red Flag, CP Sells Them Out ...... '" ...... 14 -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 496, 23 February 1990

-~ Repnnted from Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985 Mandela Released-Black South Africa Jubilant, Defiant Smash Apartheid-Black Workers Nationalism Is a Deathtrap for Black Masses-Build a Proletarian Party to Smash Apartheld l Must Take Power! ...... , ...... 36 South Africa: Razor's Edge ...... 16 -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 504, 15 June 1990

-Repnnted from Workers Vanguard No. 375, 22 March 1985 South African CP Leader Joe Slovo: Black Masses Battle Apartheid Repression ...... 21 From "Uncle Joe" Stalin to Gorby ...... 40

-- Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 380, 31 May 1985 By Mumia Abu-Jamal From Darkness Into Light ...... 42 Interracial Sex Ban Jolted in South Africa ...... 24 -Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 504, 15 June 1990 -~-Repnnted from Workers Vanguard No. 387, 20 September 1985 Nelson Mandela in America Wall Street and the Apartheid State ...... 28 Smash Apartheid! For Workers Revolution! ...... 43 3

adapted ji-mn Workers Vanguard Nos. 515 and 516.30 Novemher and 14 Decemher 1990 ANC, Communist Party Seek to Repackage Apartheid South Africa and Permanent Revolution Nine months after the release of. Afri­ can National Congress leader Nelson Mandela from apartheid prison, South Africa is at a decisive turning point. The imperialist media talk of "power shar­ ing" between the white minority regime headed hy Nationalist prime minister F. W. De Klerk and the ANC as leader of the oppressed black, coloured (mixed­ race) and Indian populations which con­ stitute more than six-sevenths of the total. The Ecollomist (3 November) pub­ lishes a special survey of South Africa titled, "After Apartheid." But while the name may change, what's being talked about is reforming and sprucing up the racist system. As constitutional commis­ sions deliberate, there is hitter anger in black townships and factories against the murderous apartheid repression, and mounting disaffection with the ANC leaders accused of falling for De Klerk's honeyed words. Where is freedom, they demand, as the death tolls climb. There can be no end to the system of apartheid slavery short of socialist revo­ lution. Superexploitation of hlaek labor is the bedrock on which South African capitalism has been built, and with it the whole edifice of white supremacy. Any­ ~ thing even approaching a minimum of I I OSATU Combative unionists demonstrate for Workers Charter, October 1990. Black how;r;cois democracy (such as "one per­ proletariat must fight for its own class power! son, one vote") is incompatihle with the continued existence of that social sys­ the ANC leaders and the South African every leftist and anti-apartheid organi­ tem. Fighting for the land which has heen Communist Party are the greatest obsta­ zation seems to be falling into line be­ stolen from them, for the mines and cles to black freedom, chaining the hind this hetrayal. Desperately needed is factories which produce enormous wealth oppressed populations to the apartheid a revolutionary leadership which can from their toil. South Africa's hlack masters in a "popular front" alliance lead the oppressed masses in the facto­ masses sense this basic fact. with De Klerk and the "I'crligtc" (en­ ries, the townships and the bantustans But as the decisive hour approaches, lightened) capitalists. And now virtually in forging organs of dual power in the Smash Apartheid-Workers to Power'! . 4 fight for a black-centered workers gov­ ernment in South Africa. As a wave of shadowy terror swept through the Transvaal, leaving over 500 dead in a two-week period in August, Mandela "urged the government to use the full force of its security apparatus to end the violence" (Johannesburg Star, 12 September). "Mandel a wants an iron fist. We're going to give an iron fist," said Major General Gerrit Erasmus, po­ lice commissioner in the Witwatersrand. "Operation Iron Fist" imposed virtual martial law on 27 black townships, sur­ rounding them with razor wire and brutal police occupation. With the lid clamped on, De Klerk traveled to Washington where he stood at the Reflecting Pool AFP with George Bush and obscenely de­ CP leader Joe Siovo and Nelson Mandela campaign for "power-sharing" with clared solidarity with Martin Luther masters of apartheid. King's "dream." In May the ANC and the Nationalist for the capitalists. The Economist com­ after, there was consternation in corpo­ government held "talks about talks" at plains, "miners attend union meetings in rate boardrooms when Mandela reaf­ Groote Schuur. In August, Mandela military uniforms, armed with imitation firmed the ANC's call for nationaliza­ signed the "Pretoria Minute" with De AK-47s .... Production is disrupted by tion of the mines. The Johannesburg Klerk, agreeing to give up armed strug­ stayaways that have nothing to do with gold market sank to the floor" (WV gle in exchange for release of political wage claims and everything to do with No. 496, 23 February). The ANC has prisoners. It was a one-sided "peace": 'the struggle'." They worry about the long advocated a "mixed economy" and black townships were drenched in blood Communist Party (SACP). But to show some form of negotiated settlement in the mysterious "Reef Wars," as their commitment to a "post-apartheid" with the white-supremacist regime. The Inkatha terrorists of KwaZulu bantustan capitalist state, the ANC, SACP and their famous phrase in the 1955 "Freedom satrap Mangosuthu Buthelezi and their allies in COSATU (Congress of South Charter," that "mineral wealth beneath police protectors roamed with impunity. Africa Trade Unions) have denounced the soil ... shall be transferred to the own­ As for political prisoners, the govern­ militant sit-down strikes, sacrificing ership of the people as a whole," is pur­ ment claimed there were a grand total hundreds of unionists and pledging to posely vague. The Jo 'burg bankers and of 40-50, while the families of over protect company profits (see accompa­ industrialists want the ANC to spell out 3,000 jailed anti-apartheid fighters have nying article on the Mercedes-Benz its commitments. yet to see their loved ones. strike). In May, Mandela told a conference of Meanwhile, to reassure the capitalist Last February, Mandela's first speech­ I'erligte capitalists organized by Anglo rulers, the ANC backed off its long-held es after his release from Pollsmoor American mining magnate Gavin Reily position for nationalization of the gold prison reiterated ANC commitment to "a secret": "the view that the only words and diamond mines-the heart of South "armed struggle" and the alliance with in the economic vocabulary that the ANC Africa's economy. But this is not enough the SACP. We noted, "The morning knows are nationalisation and redistribu­ tion is mistaken." In September Mandela told the Financial Mail that he has "never advocated socialism at all" and that he favors "the flourishing of capi­ talism among Africans." And at the beginning of October the ANC issued a revised economic policy statement say­ ing that only state-owned industries, like utility companies, which the government is trying to privatize, "will be subject to immediate re-nationalization." As the bosses decry "mayhem" and the country lurches chaotically, the black unions and anti-apartheid organizations are thrown into crisis, with raging internal debates over "which way for­ ward." In the pages of the Weekly Mail, Work in Progress, South Aji"ican Labour Bulletin and even the SACP's Aji'ican Communist. articles and readers' letters

Independent abound on the key question of Stalinism Cape Town police shoot at anti-apartheid demonstrators who came to greet vs. Trotskyism. This is no abstract Mandela on the day of his release. debate: the issue is reform or revolution 5 and the stakes are enormous. As Stalinist pledging fealty to Zulu King Shaka. The Johannesburg and Soweto on September regimes collapse all across East Europe very real tribal tensions in South Africa 13. Masked attackers boarded the train under the weight of their own contradic­ today are more the product of apart­ at a Jo'burg station but made no move tions and in the face of the imperialist heid's "divide-and-rule" schemes, carv­ until after its next stop, when it became onslaught, we have noted that the South ing the black African population up into a partial express passing through two African masses don't bel ieve in the myriad bantustans and deliberately using other stations, giving them ten minutes "death of Communism." Yet Stalinism migrant labor which is segregated off in to carry out their gory attack: in its death agony has one last gasp­ men-only hostels to work the mines and "They ran through coaches, shooting and trying to hold on in South Africa long other key industries. hacking at passengers, hurling dozens enough to betray one more revolution to There are curious patterns to the terror. through exit doors to fall in a tangle of broken limbs down steep embankments. the bourgeoisie. For instance, its timing, breaking out "At Benrose station, another gang was South Africa today expresses the quin­ precisely one day after the signing of the waiting on the platform. When the doors tessence of Trotsky's program of perma­ Pretoria Minute on August 6. Another is opened and the panic-stricken passengers nent rel'olution in which the most basic the seeming inability of the massive spilled out, this second gang attacked, democratic demands-"one person, one South African intelligence apparatus shooting and slashing at more people with long machetes. In all, 26 people vote," land to the tiller, ending slave-like to find the perpetrators. Black miners were killed and more than 100 injured. oppression in the mining compounds and leader Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking at "None of the attackers said a word bantustans-can only be solved when Howard University on September 26, throughout the carnage, leading to specu­ the working class comes to power. Never noted that in two months of right-wing lation that they were not South Africans." before has the combative black working terror throughout the Transvaal, the Sparks cited reports that some Inkatha class been better organized. Yet the police made exactly one arrest. And that squads were trained alongside Mozam­ Stalinists of the South African Commu­ was when a township defense squad bican "Renamo" mercenaries at camps nist Party, playing out their historic caught an Inkatha terrorist in the act of operated by the South African army. The role, try to contain this fight within the burning a house in Soweto and turned TV show South Africa Now raised similar bounds of a "national-democratic" capi­ him over to the cops. suggestions in a 3 October report on "The talist state. The urgent task is forging a Allister Sparks in the WashinRton Post Hidden Hand" behind the violence: "A Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for (22 September) described the military Renamo speciality has been attacking workers revolution. precision of the single most blood­ transportation lines in Mozambique, very curdling incident, the slaughter of com­ much the modus operandi of similar Behind the "Reef War" muters aboard a rush-hour train between massacres on commuter trains outside While the ANC called off the "armed struggle," right-wing forces took this as a signal to launch a killing spree. The International Communist League hideous murders have thus far taken more than 1,000 lives, and are sporadi­ (Fourth Internationalist) cally continuing. The Western press tries Correspondence for: Address to: to reduce this to "ancient tribal rivalries" Spartaclst League of Australia ...... Spartacist League, GPO Box 3473 between Zulu and Xhosa, playing up Sydney, NSW, 2001, Australia images of savagery, while liberals talk Spartaclst League/Britain ...... Spartacist Publications, PO Box 1041 politely of "inter-ethnic contlict" and London NW5 3EU, England wring their hands about "black-on-black Trotskyist League of Canada ...... '" .. , Trotskyist League, Box 7198, Station A violence." But this slaughter grows out Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X8, Canada of a terror campaign by Buthelezi's Spartaklst.Arbelterpartel Deutschlands .... SpAD, Postfach 51 0655 Inkatha, whose gangs of thugs have mur­ 1000 Berlin 51, Germany dered more than 4,000 people in Natal Verlag Avantgarde, Postfach 11 0231 province during the last five years and 2000 Hamburg 11, Germany have now extended their operations to LlgueTrotskyste de France ...... Le Bolchevik, BP 135-10 the Vaal Reef. Seeking to scuttle, or at 75463 Paris Cedex 10, France least reshape ANC-government negotia­ Spartacist Group India/Lanka ...... , .... , write to Spartacist, New York tions, various elements of the apartheid regime and its puppets have conspired Dublin Spartacist Youth Group ...... , PO Box 2944, Dublin 1 to touch off a tribal war, and have to Republic of Ireland some extent succeeded. Lega Trotskista d'italia ...... " ...... Walter Fidacaro The theory of age-old "inter-tribal C. P 1591, 20101 Milano, Italy violence" is belied by the fact that the Spartacist Group Japan ...... , Spartacist Group Japan terror in Natal has pitted Inkatha Zulu PO Box 18, Chitose-Yubinkyoku Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 156, Japan impis (squads) against other Zulus who support the pro-ANC United Democratic Grupo Espartaqulsta de Mexico ...... P Linares, Apdo. Postal 453 06002, Mexico 1, D.F., Mexico Front. Furthermore, a recent book on the Xhosa, The Dead Will Arise by Professor Spartakusowska Grupa Polski ...... Platforma Spartakusowcow, SKR 741 Jeff Peires, chairman of the history 50-950 Wroclaw 2, Poland department of Transkei University, notes Spartaclst League/U.S ...... Spartacist League, Box 1377 GPO that there was only one recorded clash New York, NY 10116, USA between the Zulus and the Xhosas­ Spartacist/USSR ...... USSR in 1827, and even that was a minor 121019 Moscow, g-19 skirmish which ended with the latter A/Ya 19 6

Johannesburg." Among the "fingers" of the "hidden hand" are the Koevet, a coun­ terinsurgency unit used by the South Africans in Namibia; the Inkatha vigi­ lantes; and the army's infamous "Civil Cooperation Bureau." A recent govern­ ment "inquiry" into this assassination bu­ reau found no evidence of death squads, even though they had confessions from white and black members describing the murders they had carried out! The fascist "white right" has also stepped up its activity lately, organiz­ ing for race war. The largest grouping, the AWB (Afrikaner Resistance Move­ ment) of Eugene TerreBlanche, with its swastika-like emblem, has been recruit­ ing for paramilitary "Boerekomman­ dos." Last spring, AWB-affiliated vigi­ lantes in Welkom, in the Orange Free State, launched a murderous offensive against blacks in the mines and a nearby township. In early July there was a series Magubane of bomb attacks in Johannesburg against Above: Inkatha thugs launched terror campaign. Below: Xhosas murder "suspected Zulu." For raCially integrated workers defense guards to halt a synagogue, an anti-apartheid Afrikaans bloody communalist warfare whipped up by apartheid rulers! paper and a crowded black bus station, which were claimed by a previously ..... unheard-of white-supremacist terror out­ fit. And the Weekly Mail (19 October) reports that "A spate of assassinations and attempted murders of African Na­ tional Congress activists over the past week has raised fears that apartheid death squads are back in business." In the background of the "Reef war" there are different forces at work. Hard­ liners in the police and army-which have stood by and watched as Inkatha gangs attack-seek to shore up the crum­ bling ramparts of apartheid by scuttling negotiations. In addition to these die­ hards, the De Klerk "reformers" (includ­ ing the Broederbond secret society of Afrikaner leaders which was the hard core of the apartheid regime) want to expand the "negotiations" to include their kept dogs like Buthelezi. To dilute the influence of the ANC/SACP they have even extended invitations to the Guardia'n [Londo;] black nationalists of the PAC (Pan­ we urged our people to work in consul­ ships are saying, "Give us MK"-short Africanist Congress) and AZAPO (Aza­ tation with them. The result was that we for Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the nian People's Organisation), which are were often hooed .... Nation), the ANC's armed wing-and "During our visits to the townships, a reportedly in turmoil over the issue. The desperate call for arms became deafen­ "Give us Hani." terror campaign also works to create a ing. And at meetings, unless a speaker Unlike many ANCers who after re­ climate of fear in the townships which, said something very specific on the ques­ turning home have become the darlings together with the police-imposed curfew, tion of self defence and arms, his mes­ of the white liberal cocktail circuit, Chris sage fell on deaf ears. Hani, the MK chief of staff, has report­ undercuts the feverish organizing cam­ "Some ANC workers even became re­ paign of anti-apartheid forces. luctant to come face-to-tilce with com­ edly set up operations along with 2,000 But in response to the terror, the rades from conflict-ridden areas. They fighters in the Transkei, where he is response of the ANC ... was to appeal to had no answer to the dcmand for anns .... staying in the home of former chief the apartheid police! Andrew Mapheto, Instead pcople felt the ANC was display­ Kaiser Matanzima. Some of his support­ ing a political paralysis and had fallen regional ANC organizer in the PWV prey to De Klerk's sweet talk." ers refer to this as "the first liberated (Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal Reef) re­ -Work ill Progress, zone." The Siiddeutsche Zeitung (14 No­ gion, wrote in a revealing account: Septemher 1990 vember) writes: "In his speeches, often "Unfortunately, the more reports of The imperialist press reports that the entirely in Xhosa, for which he likes to police misconduct reached us, the more young "comrades" in thc Vaal town- show up in a camouflage jacket, he calls

------.,.,~.------.. --'_._----_.. , .'------7

on his soldiers to 'stay in the trenches'." workers, to suppress both the right-wing conditions of extreme poverty. But behind the militant rhetoric, what terrorists and the fomenters of bloody These are the existing lines of division Hani is actually doing is setting up an communalist war. In tsarist Russia, the along which a desperate competition for ethnic-regional local power in the Tran­ Bolsheviks in the oil-producing center the spoils of office is carried out. This skei (where pro-apartheid elements just of Baku organized such workers military can only be transcended through social­ attempted a coup against the pro-ANC formations to suppress mutual commu­ ist revolution eliminating the fratricidal bantustan military rulers). Does Hani, nal ist slaughter among the Armenians competition for a few meager crumbs the hero of the "young lions" in the town­ and Azerbaijanis, incited by the petty­ from the capitalists' table and placing ships, want to succeed Mandela at the bourgeois nationalists of both peoples. the enormous wealth (presently in the head of the ANC by building a Xhosa In South Africa today, workers defense hands of rich corporations like Anglo tribal base in a dressed-up bantustan'? guards could develop into powerful American) at the service of all the toilers. The danger of tribal war is real. In organs of proletarian dual power which Desperately needed is an authentically order to undercut the ANC, which sells can derail the ANC/De Klerk/Relly plans communist party built on the program its liberal program with appeals to "non­ for a "post-apartheid" capitalist state. of permanent revolution and mobilizing racial unity" across ethnic lines, the Precisely because of the economic­ the power of the black proletariat, which Inkatha squads surged out of mainly Zulu development fostered by South African can unite and champion the rights of migrant workers' hostels into surround­ capitalism, the various racial, ethnic all, the Xhosa and Zulu, Venda and ing largely Xhosa townships, killing at and tribal groups arc intermingled as Sotho, migrant workers from Mozam­ random. Soon Xhosas were launching nowhere else on the continent. Indians bique and Botswana, the coloureds and murderous attacks on the hostels. This is led by Mohandas Gandhi played a key Asians, and those growing numbers of attested to as well by the account of role in the founding of the Congress whites who do not wish to spend their ANCer Mapheto, who while criticizing movement. The Afrikaans-speaking col­ lives in a doomed racist garrison state attempts to portray the violence as "a oured population in the Cape province awaiting a fiery Gijtterdiimmerung 111 Xhosa-Zulu war" notes that often "all has historically been in the vanguard of their bunkers. people who were Zulu-speaking were struggle against racial discrimination. seen as being responsible," and in one And although the white population as a Communist Party Against area "sectors of the youth felt every whole is a privileged caste enjoying Communism home with Zulu-speaking inhabitants relative prosperity paid for by the toil As part of the bargaining for the had to be burned or demolished." of black labor, many whites also have release of Nelson Mandela, last Febru­ Mapheto himself was surrounded by a been active in anti-apartheid struggles, ary the government legalized the South lynch mob of Xhosa youth who thought from the ANC to the black unions. African Communist Party, which had the ANCers were Zulus because their car But the ANC, with its popular-front pro­ been banned since 1950. In April, SACP had Natal license plates. And at report­ gram aiming at a "post-apartheid" capi­ general secretary Joe Slovo came home back meetings, he says, people asked, talist state, cannot overcome the racial/ from Zambia after 27 years in exile. "Give us guns and we will kill the ethnic/tribal communal animosities that Over the last several months, the CP has Zulus." are bred by the struggle for survival in been rapidly recruiting after years of It's not surprising that there is concern clandestinity. This is significant interna­ that a government of the ANC (many of tionally. While mass Stalinist parties are whose present leaders are Xhosa, includ­ disintegrating from East Europe and the ing Mandela, Tambo, Sisulu, Mbeki, Soviet Union to the "Eurocommunists" Hani) would favor their own tribal of West Europe, in South Africa town­ grouping. For all its appeals for "non­ ship youth and striking workers proudly racialism," the ANC's only answer to wave the red flag and call themselves attempts to provoke tribal warfare has Communists. In the United States, the been to appeal to the apartheid regime moribund CPUSA tries to give an im­ to impose its racist "law and order," or pression of vitality by covering itself watch as the Xhosa youth get swept into with the SACP mantle. the communalist bloodletting. The his­ The Communist Party held its first . tory of neocolonial regimes in Africa, open mass rally in a stadium near Jo­ such as Zimbabwe where the govern­ hannesburg on July 29, drawing 50,000 ment of Robert Mugabe based on the supporters for the "welcome home" cele­ Shona has wielded supremacy over the bration. The event reportedly began with Ndebele led by Joshua Nkomo, is replete the singing of the Internationaie in with examples of domination by one Zulu, and the stadium resounded to tribe over another. That this has been the stamp and rhythm of the toyi-toyi the fate of much of post-colonial black dance of defiance. Nelson Mandela was Africa is tragic enough; in the industrial the featured speaker, saying that the powerhouse of the continent this need ANC regarded the SACP as a "depend­ not and must not happen. able friend." The highlight was the What is needed is the formation of announcement of the identities of 22 of union-based workers defense guards, the SACP's "internal leadership group," linking the factory to the townships, including many internationally known Dhladhla/AFP and made up of class-conscious workers "Hidden hand" of apartheid state anti-apartheid figures. Nine are members including Zulus, Xhosas and members behind the grisly slaughter aboard of the ANC executive committee, an of other tribal groupings, as well as Johannesburg-Soweto commuter indication of the degree to which the coloured, Asian and anti-racist white train, September 13. ANC and SACP leaderships overlap. 8

Most significant was the number of prominent unionists among the Commu­ nist Party leaders. Many were surprised to learn that virtually the entire leader­ ship of the "workerist" wing of the unions had been recruited to the SACP, including such figures as Moses Maye­ ANC leaders: kiso, general secretary of the National Umkhonto we Union of Metal Workers (NUMSA), Sizwe commander South Africa's second-biggest union, Chris Hani (left), and top COSATU leaders Chris Dlamini, international John Gomomo and Sidney Mafumadi. director The absorption of what was seen as the Thabo Mbeki. independent socialist left of the black union movement into and under the dis­ cipline of the SACP is of enormous con­ sequence. For decades, the CP was the youth in the interests of their "enlight­ for his leftist audience about being an favorite target of apartheid propaganda, ened" but hardly democratic bourgeois "unrehabilitated utopian," his message gaining a reputation for militancy de­ masters. was that "we as a Communist Party do spite its reformist program, as the only Earlier this year, SACP leader Joe not place immediately on the agenda the substantial party which fought for racial Slovo got international attention with his socialist project," and further that "in a integration and was itself integrated. pamphlet Has Socialism Failed? For the situation in which the socialist project Drawing on these credentials today, the benefit of pro-Gorbachev CPers in the is not realistically immediately obtain­ CP is the vehicle through which South West who don't want to just throw in able ... an emphasis on it actually discred­ African rulers seek to tame the combat­ the towel, he makes a nod in the direction its the prospect of eventually building ive black unions and draw them into of "working-class internationalism" and socialism." active participation in the construction "Marxist theory," while purging the lat­ The SACP/ANC leader was up-front of the "post-apartheid" capitalist state. ter of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in speaking to Wall Street and the White Here we see most vividly what that is, of workers revolution! Mean­ House through an interview with colum­ American socialist leader Daniel De while, he assures the Jo 'burg Board of nist Anthony Lewis in the New York Leon and Y. I. Lenin were talking of Trade that this "Communist" is not talk­ Times (15 October): when they referred to the "labor lieuten­ ing about "the premature abandonment '" I believe the rights to property should ants of the capitalist class." After four of any role for market forces" (see be retained,' Joe Slovo said. 'It would decades underground and in exile, the "South African CP Leader Joe Slovo: be absurd for us to move into a post­ apartheid society trying to eliminate the SACP old guard wants a share in admin­ From 'Uncle Joe' Stalin to Gorby," private sector, foreign investment and so istering state power in their lifetime. In pages 40-41 of this pamphlet). Now he on. We know that they aren't charities a country with a working class that is has gone out of his way to spell out and they need security, they need the one of the most combative and conscious the real program and appetites of the feeling that what they've got they're going to keep .... ' in the world, where in 1984-86 the huge SACP to reassure the Randlords and "Mr. Slovo said he believed in the market black townships rose up in revolt for their imperialist overlords. system and in economic incentives." months and since then have carried out On a mid-October visit to the Uniied Slovo also said that while "some" land the ANC policy of making them "ungov­ States, Slovo spoke at a Monthly Review would have to be redistributed to the ernable," that means policing the black conference in New York on "The Future black majority, "some efficient large unions and the ever-explosive black of Socialism." Aside from some remarks farms would remain undivided" in the interests of "maintaining agricultural A c C production." if> Freedom Charter" Movement. called for ownership of mineral wealth by "the people as a whole," the SACP now says that the "public interest" will be served by leaving Anglo American and other capitalist giants in control of the wealth and profits produced by the toi I of black labor!

~~ ___ nl.=="""""""",,____ ,,__ ,,______~-----,.,.. "~ .. ~.. -.. ------"" .... _---'" •...• -._---_.. 9

This is laid out at length in the pages for imperialist capital to "penetrate the the situation.' says Michael Xego. the of the SACP's theoretical journal, the African market"! ANC's publicity officer in the Port Eliza­ beth area .. But no one can expect the Aji-ican Communist, which ought more Communism this isn't. And while shacks. the unemployment. to just go appropriately to be called the "African Anglo American's Gavin Reily may look away, poof. overnight.' Capitalist." [n the Fourth Quarter 1990 to Slovo to discipline "his" workforce, "Where once the ANC sought to exploit issue, an article on "Nationalisation or some of the younger generation of ANC the impoverished township conditions to Free Enterprise?" by Phineas Malinga leaders educated in the "broad front" create social instability-' ungovernabil­ ity' was the revolutionary word-it is states: politics of the UDF and MDM don't see now desperate to maintain stability. 'We "A crucial fact about the South African the need for a Communist Party at all. are going to inherit most of the problems gold mining industry is that it produces Recently, in elections for the ANC's here.' says Michael Ndube of the ANC's a commodity which has to be sold on Western Cape regional executive, United youth branch." world markets at a price which the mines can perhaps influence by their marketing Democratic Front leader Christian Pinto A crisis of expectations may soon tactics but certainly do not control. The forced out two leading Communist Party explode. welfare of the industry-not only its memhers, declaring that "dual leader­ owners but also its workers-and its ship" was wrong. "We believe in the The "Independent Left" in the contribution to the national balance of fANC-Communist Party] alliance. But Tow of the ANC/SACP payments depend on its ability to keep production costs per ounce of gold thi s means separate parties," Pinto said As the steam mounts in the South below the market price. Does the ANC (Washingto/l Post, 2 October). Pinto, African pressure cooker, the pressure of possess an alternative cadre of senior who is black, also made an ominous the popular front is pushing the whole management who could be guaranteed racialist appeal against SACPers Reg array of leftist and militant nationalist to improve upon the performance of the present management in this respect" September and Sheryl Carolus, both of groupings into the wake of the ANC/ The answer is no. What then would be achieved by changing the structure of the industry from near monopoly to com­ plete monopoly and putting civil servants in charge') The answer is doubtful. Therefore the application of the classical form of nationalisation to the gold mines is a project of doubtful worth." The "classical form of nationalization" rejected by the SACP is clearly the social-democratic program of nationali­ zation under a capitalist regime. But the real question posed is not whether or not the mines should be administered by "civil servants" but the expropriation of the wealth and power of the capitalist owners by a revolutionary workers gov­ ernment. For the SACP reformists, such a perspective is simply inconceivable. These "Communists" are not just in­ terested in an alliance with South African capital, but with the multinational cor­ porations as well: "The necessary expansion of the South African economy will undoubtedly re­ Afrapix quire the investment of large amounts of South African trade unionists march under the hammer and sickle of capital"" Dogmatic opposition to for­ eign investment therefore seems an un­ Communism. Oppressed black masses want red revolution, not "power­ promising line to pursue .... A democratic sharing" with apartheid capitalists. South Africa will have considerable at­ tractions to multinationals as a base from whom are coloured (mixed-race), And in SACP, Black nationalists and "black which to penetrate the African market as the ANC top levels, international direc­ consciousness" groups could have been a whole." tor Thabo Mbeki is reportedly uncom­ expected to come forward now as young For years our Spartacist tendency took fortable with the SACP's influence. militants grow disillusioned with ANC. quite a bit of flak for criticizing the While a new generation of black yup­ Indeed, the Pan Africanist Congress liberal/reformist program of calling on pies in the ANC might like to dump the initially refused to join the negotiations the imperialists to impose economic Communist Party in order to get on with with De Klerk, and as a result were "sanctions" on the apartheid regime and the business of "power-sharing" with the reportedly recruiting after years of stag­ on the multinational corporations to apartheid bosses, the young black "com­ nation. But PAC leader Zeph Mothopeng "disinvest" in South Africa. Washington rades" in the townships grow uneasy died in October, and the group is report­ and Wall Street are no friends of South about the direction the ANC is going. edly split between "hardliners" and African blacks, we warned. So here you The Wall Street Journal (24 September) "conciliators," Now Mothopeng's suc­ have the logical result of the "sanc­ notes how black auto workers in Port cessor Clarence Makwetu has declared tions/divestment" strategy-the SACP Elizabeth, many of whom lost their johs that he can "work together" with Man­ and ANC envision themselves joining as a result of anti-apartheid sanctions, dela for "democracy in South Africa"­ with Anglo American in administering now look to the ANC to hetter their lives. i,e" to get in on the talks. South Africa on behalf of the World , .. Every res ident in the area is expecting AZAPO also initially refused to par­ Bank, the IMF and Citibank, as a "base" an ANC government to quickly improve ticipate in the government-ANC talks, 10

() Ql 3 co 0- ro_ U5 -< to 3 Ql

Gold miners are at the heart of South Africa's powerful black proletariat.

However, their emigre mentors of the cannot be directed on the need for ests in the event of the black petty­ Black Consciousness Movement of Aza­ socialist revolution." If the level of mass bourgeois leaders of the ANC/UDF com­ nia prevailed on them to drop this struggle is now in a lull, it is not ing to office-as in Zimbabwe, where opposition, alleging a danger of hecom­ because the repressive apparatus of the Mugabe had just crushed a bitter strike. ing "marginalized." So now AZAPO white-supremacist state has become But this "workerist" tendency has since is raising "conditions" for negotiations, stronger; it is because the ANC/SACP is been co-opted by the Communist Party, demanding that a constituent assembly now policing both the townships and the which has a very different agenda. be convoked and negotiations he held factories on behalf of De Klerk and Today, COSATU 's Workers Charter cam­ "as far outside the country as possible." Reily. paign is for including certain "rights" How about Washington or New York,? And Alexander is tailing Mandela and (union organization, minimum wage) in In fact, these "militants" are calling on Siovo. Thus WOSA won't come out hard the constitution of a "'post-apartheid" the United Nations to supervise voting against negotiations, as that would break capitalist state. Thus COSATU's cam­ for an assembly and to assume security the "spirit of unity and democracy." So paign bulletin questions even including and policing in South Africa (Weekly instead they call for "advancing mass the right to work, which is labeled a Mail, 14 September). Is that supposed struggles," claiming that this will "desta­ "long-term goal" rather than an "imme­ to be before or after the UN fig leaf for biIize" negotiations as the ANC/SACP diate right." The ANC/SACP/COSATU U.S. imperialism invades Iraq? AZAPO are "at pains to demobilize the masses." talk of a "workers charter" in order to wants to get in the diplomatic swim of So what do they say now that Mandela cover up the fact that they seek a better things; communists must swim against is calling for a campaign of mass mo­ contract under wage slavery rather than the stream when it is heading to disaster. bilization, in order to consolidate control a fight for workers power. In April, Neville Alexander's Cape of the masses in order to sell them out? Another pressure group on the ANC/ Action League formed the Workers Or­ Instead of negotiations, Alexander et al. SACP is the Marxist Workers' Tendency ganisation of South Africa (WOSA), call for "a non-negotiable fight" for of the ANC, supporters of Ted Grant's declaring it an "independent political demands such as "one person, one vote," "Militant" tendency in Britain. Where organization of the working class" which "dismantling of the repressive forces and the Militant group acts as an organic "shall strive to have a clear socialist per­ fascist groups," "dismantling of the ban­ wing of the British Labour Party, rather spective:' Alexander is widely misiden­ tustans," agrarian reform, nationaliza­ than seeking to build a revolutionary tified in South Africa as a Trotskyist, tion of banks and mines, etc. By whom vanguard party, the MWT acts as a com­ although his politics are more or less or what, one must ask, if not the workers ponent of the petty-bourgeois African classic Menshevism with a black nation­ revolution which they. like Joe Slo\'o. National Congress, even after the ANC alist twist. In the past, his Cape Action claim is not Oil the agenda. expelled it. In their paper, Congress Mili­ League was associated with AZAPO in In a "self-interview" in the first issue tallt (October 1990), the MWT makes the National Forum. of Workers Voice (August 1(90), its many correct observations about the In a "Proposed Resolution on Nego­ theoretical review, the WOSA leader­ appetites and program of ANC. But they tiations" (reprinted in Bulletill ill Delense ship talks of "strengthening the strategic see the ANC's "rejecting a strategy of ot Mar,isfII, July-August 1(90), WOSA position of the working class" through workers' revolution" as a (correctable) puts forth a defeatist perspective, assert­ "the Workers Charter campaign." A few "blunder," and write: "We believe the ing that "the balance of forces between years ago, militants in the black unions first task of every militant in Congress the government and the liberation move­ counterposed a "Workers Charter" to is now to arm the ANC with Marxist ment is sti II starkly in favor of the the "'Freedom Charter," in a syndicalist policies, and transform it into a mass government" and that Hour agitation attempt to defend working-class inter- workers' party to guarantee victory." 11

In the 1930s Leon Trotsky urged his The arming of the black proletariat in ented phrase), demands must be confined followers to "unmask before the native South Africa today is, to be sure, far to "democratic struggle" and the fight masses the inability of the [African more difficult than in Germany in the for socialist revolution postponed to the National] Congress to achieve the real­ period of the Revolution of 1848. How­ never-never land of the Greek calends. ization of even its own demands, because ever, the key task remains the same: What this means in practice is that in of its superficial, conciliatory policy" breaking the plebeian masses from the exchange for some cosmetic reforms, ("On the South African Theses," Writ­ petty-bourgeois democracy and the for­ strikes are now broken not just hy the inxs [1934-35J). While Trotsky exposed mation of organizations of proletarian policeman's siamhol.: (whip) but also. as the ANC's incapacity to carry out even dual power under communist leadership. at Mercedes-Benz, hy the ANC/SACP/ a bourgeois-democratic program, Ted COSATU "revolutionary alliance" hold­ Grant's supporters call on these petty­ For South African Trotskyism! ing up the "stop" sign saying "don't pro­ bourgeois nationalists to lead a proletar­ As the fate of the country and of the ceed beyond democratic stage." ian socialist revolution! In this way they struggle for black freedom is being By the Third Quarter issue of Il)Xl), strengthen the authority of the ANC decided, South Africa is-not acciden­ the Aji-ican COlllmlillist was obliged to among the black toilers, an authority tally-in the midst of a "Trotsky boom." say that it had received an avalanche of which is now used to suppress workinx­ Two years ago the SACP's African Com­ letters in response. However. they had class struxxle. munist (Fourth Quarter 1988) published "decided not to publish the contri­ A frequent and sharp critic of the an article, "What Is Trotskyism?" by butions" since "undertaking a general ANC/SACP is the journal Searchlixht "Dialego." In accord with the prevailing reappraisal of Trotsky and Trotskyism is South Africa, published in London by winds of glasnost, it presented a view not the task of our journal." This piece the Baruch Hirson group. Hirson cer­ similar to Gorbachev's speech on the of glasnost censorship only produced a tainly knows the SACP and its program­ 70th anniversary of the Russian Revolu­ new spate of controversy, and the de hate matic appetites well, having battled the tion, admitting that Trotsky "did play soon spilled over to virtually every anti­ Stalinists since the 1930s, enabling him an important role (as Stalin himself apartheid publication. In a widely repro­ to see through Joe Slovo the born-again acknowledged) in the October Revolu­ duced article, ANC leader Pallo Jordan social democrat. But Searchlight South tion," but labeling Trotskyism a "form criticized Joe Slovo's pamphlet I/as Africa's alternative to the ANC/SACP of ultra-leftism which promotes pseudo­ SocialislII Failed? for failing to go to line is simply to "democratize" the revolutionary principles at the expense the root of Stalinism and notes that "power-sharing" negotiations: of practical politics." What the SACP is "employing the method of historical "Delegates to such talks must be drawn pushing is Stalin's schema of "two-stage materialism," Trotsky "provided one of from all parties, all organizations and all revolution." the most original critiques of the Soviet trade unions. The ANC has no mandate In classical Stalinist fashion, "Dia­ system." The Weekly Mail has kept up a to speak for the disenfranchised, and no lego" tried to beat militants in the stream of articles and letters, includ­ one has nominated them to act on behalf of aiL ... black unions over the head with the club ing a pained reply from Brian Bunting "At the conclusion of all talks, their of "Trotskyism," saying: "Like Trotsky under the heading "The SACP has not results must be submitted to the public before them, the 'workerists' in South ignored discussion on Trotskyism and for approval." Africa get the relationship between Stalinism." Interestingly, after calling for a nego­ socialism and democracy precisely With all the ink devoted to Trotsky­ tiated transition to a supposedly class­ wrong." As opposed to "Fairy Tale Rev­ ism in South Africa, there is precious less democracy, Searchlight South Afri­ olutionaries," who want to "pole-vault little heing published which accurately ca quotes extensively from Marx's themselves into socialism" (Slovo's pat- portrays what Trotsky stood for, and address to the Communist League in 1850, when he believed a new outbreak of revolution against Pruss ian absolut­ ism and the petty German princes was imminent. But significantly they omit a key passage where Marx calls for armed organs of proletarian dual power inde­ pendent of and counterposed to the petty-bourgeois democrats: " ... in order to be able energetically and threateningly to oppose this [bourgeois­ democratic] party, whose treachery to the workers will begin from the first hours of victory, the workers must be armed and organised. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, muskets, cannon and ammunition must be carried out at once ... the workers must try to organise themselves independently as a proletarian guard with commanders elected by themselves and with a general staff of their own choosing, and to put themselves under the command not of the state authority but of the revolution­ ary mun,!cipal councils set up by the ANC workers. ANC/SACP leaders talk of "post-apartheid" state. But even before the "apart­ - Karl Marx and Frederick heid" regime came to power in 1948 South African capitalism was based on Engels, Collected Works, white supremacy, superexploitation of black labor. Demonstration in 1930s Volume 10 for equal rights and release of imprisoned comrades. 12

The superprofits of the Randlords arc based on superexploitation-paying black workers less than what it costs to maintain them and their families even at the most minimum level-which is incompatihle with democratic rights. Take the situation in the mines. Here you have Anglo American, the beacon of "en­ lightened" capitalism, which took the lead in talking with the ANC. Yet it runs its mines through stark terror: concen­ tration camps with black workers' com­ pounds ringed with concertina wire, patrolled by heavily armed guards with vicious dogs. Why? Because their profits depend on it. If Anglo American was willing to drop the color bar for skilled miners, it was in order to lower the wages from the $90 a day they were paying white blast­ ers toward the $15 which migrant black WV Photo laborers earn. As they discuss "power­ Trotskyist Spartacist League marches in New York protest, June 1983, demands internationalist labor solidarity, not imperialist sanctions. sharing," Gavin Reily will persuasively explain to Nelson Mandela that raising no group which can really be called will be bought up by real estate specu­ all wages to the white levels would Trotskyist without gagging. Thus Trot­ lators and big farmers. The obvious put the mine conglomerates out of sky declared (in his writings on Spain demand is for natiol1ali::atiol1 oj" the business-they will not be competitive in the 1930s) that "the Popular Front is lalld, which was raised by the Bolshe­ internationally and their profits will dis­ the main questio/l oj' proletarian class viks. As Marx and Lenin explained, this appear. Yes, and that is why to pay black strateR}' for this epoch" and "the best is a democratic rather than a socialist workers a real living wage and to place criterion for the difference between Bol­ demand, directed against monopoly the wealth that they produce in the shevism and Menshevism." Summing up landholdings, but one that the bourgeoi­ service of the impoverished majority, it the experience of the Spanish Civil War, sie will vigorously oppose. is necessary to expropriate the mines, he wrote: "There (an he 110 greater crime Or take the question of political de­ and the banks, industry, etc. and sweep than coalition with the hourgeoi.lie ill a mocracy, which is at the heart of the away the whole profit system. No bour­ period of socialist revolutioll." "Freedom Charter." Today, the ANC is geois regime will do that, only a hlack­ What does the popular front mean con­ preparing to accept some constitutional centered workers government brought to cretely in South Africa today? The subterfuge (a second house of parlia­ power by the revolutionary struggle of SACP's "Dialego" claims that Trotsky ment with veto power, in which whites millions of toilers led by a Trotskyist gets the relation between democracy and will be disproportionately represented, party of the proletariat. socialism wrong. Let us see. In South or a "bill of rights" protecting "minori­ The key question is workillg-class pow­ Africa, the land questio/1 is a major issue: ties") that will leave entrenched essential er, for as Trotsky's theory of permanent the 1936 Land Act limits hlack occupa­ elements of white privilege. Against revolution holds, in the imperialist epoch tion to 13.6 percent of the total territory the negotiations, various leftist groups the bourgeoisie is incapable of achieving (effectively that of the present hantu­ (AZAPO, WOSA. Searchlight South democratic tasks. In 1915, Trotsky wrote stans). Moreover, thc Pondoland peas­ Afi"ica) raise as their crowning demand an article on "The Struggle for Power," ants' revolt in the Transkei in the late the call for a cOllstiluellt assemhly. This which he later appended to his essay 1950s was directed against the Xhosa is just spelling out "one person, one "Results and Prospects" (written around tribal chiefs (as analyzed hy CPer Govan vote," calling to carry out the ANC's the time of the Russian 1905 Revolution) Mbeki in SOllth Aji'ica: The Pea.lallis' original program. when it was reissued in 1919, to explain Revolt [1964]). Yet today the ANC, not But there will he 110 "democratic" his concept of permanent revolution only the "moderate" Mbeki Jr. hut also "post-apartheid" capitalist stale. How which found its expression in the Bol­ the "militant" Chris Hani, is wooing the can you have "majority rule" and expect shevik October Revolution. In his article, tribal chiefs of the bantustans. that the oppressed majority will tolerate Trotsky calls for "a rel'liluliotlary work­ Simply abolishing the discriminatory a situation in which average white in­ ers' g(}\'emmellt, the conquest of power land reservation law, as some in the come (R 13,242 per person) is ten times by the Russian proletariat": ANC propose, will not aid the impover­ that of blacks (R I ,393); in whieh more "The demands for a national constituent ished peasantry scratching out an exis­ than seven million non-whites live in assembly, a republic, an eight-hour day, the confiscation of the land of the land­ tence in the dirt-poor bantustans. Much shacks whi Ie the backyard swimming lords, together with the demands for the less does it offer a solution to millions pool is standard in white suburbs; in immediate cessation of the war. the right of township dwellers living a precarious which infant mortality for whites (9 per of nations to self-determination, and existence as squatters until the next time 1,000 live births) is less than one-tenth a United States of Europe will playa cops and bulldozers dri ve them out of that of blacks (94-124 per I,OOO)'? South tremendous part in the agitational role of the Social Democrats. But revolu­ their tin shacks. For the impoverished African capitalism requires cheap la­ tion is first and foremost a question of blacks lack capilal, and "freeing" the hor-and therefore mass poverty and power-not of the state form (constituent market forces will simply mean that land disenfranchisement-of blacks. assembly, republic, united states) but of

... 13

the social content of the government. The tury: an autocratic regime which rules encompassing millions who inscribe demands for a constituent assembly and by the .Ijambok or the knout, which pre­ socialism on their banners and see their the confiscation of land under present conditions lose all direct revolutionary sides over vast areas of backwardness fight as the spearhead of social emanci­ significance without the readiness of the while the urban economy is built on the pation and freedom. The Pretoria regime proletariat to fight for the conquest of most modern technology. Its Achilles' can no longer hold them down; for this power. ... " heel is the young and vibrant proletariat, it requires the services of the ANC and Many observers have noted in the grouped in huge factories and mines, the SACP, to play the role of the Men­ uneven and combined development of growing increasingly conscious of its sheviks and Kerensky in 1917. What's South Africa today striking similarities social power. In ten years, the black critically needed is the forging of the to Russia in the early years of this cen- unions have grown explosively, now South African Bolshevik party. _

reprintedJrom Workers Vanguard No. 52(), /5 Fehruary 1991 South Africa and Revolution The concluding paragraph of the based on a privileged white minority. workers government." While the ref­ article, "South Africa and Permanent This makes the fight for working­ ormists with their pipe dream of Revolution" [see above I, notes in the class power more difficult. With the "power-sharing" are today opposinR "uneven and combined development of Afrikaner laager mentality-a kind struggles of the hlack proletariat (such South Africa today striking similarities of frightened racialist nationalism­ as the bitter Mercedes-Benz strike in to Russia in the early years of this cen­ white supremacy in its death throes East London), we raise the program of tury." We pointed to the autocratic re­ will have a broader social and mili­ socialist revolution which can unite gime presiding over vast areas of back­ tary base than the Russian autocracy blacks, coloureds and Indians and the wardness as well as a modern urban had at the end. And with the over­ increasing number of whites who do economy, and also to its Achilles' heel, whelming weight of national oppres­ not wish to live in a racist garrison a young and vibrant proletariat increas­ sion, until now workers' allegiances state. ingly conscious of its power. However, have been drawn, with the aid of the It is at the workplace, where the there is a danger of drawing the Rus­ reformist Communist Party, to the proletariat is physically concentrated, sian analogy too closely: there is also petty-bourgeois nationalism of the that serious struggles for class unity an important difference, centered on ANC, which is unable to overcome can be made. Organized initiaIly inde­ the racial/national question (the focus the tribal/ethnic divisions adroitly ex­ pendent of the ANC, the black trade of the first half of the article). ploited by the apartheid rulers. unions have grown explosively to In the tsarist "prison house of This underlines our insistence that become the central focus for class peoples" the Bolsheviks championed "The central strategic task for a com­ struggle in South Africa. But they have the fight for liberation of oppressed munist vanguard in South Africa is to since been co-opted by the SACP/ nations and nationalities, but the core set the proletarian and plebeian base ANC. The critical task is to break the of the revolutionary struggle was Rus­ of the ANC against the petty-bourgeois working class from the nationalist/ sian workers rising up against Russian nationalist and collaborationist tops reformist stranglehold and free its rulers. In South Africa, in contrast, the in the struggle to create organs of dual enormous power in the fight to smash black workers are fighting a regime power, the basis for a black-centered apartheid-for workers revolution. _.f{:"__ ~. ro HTPb PCBOJHOLli ",J~ IO"\~r1'1C ~}e~ 1Vr1t~~J:iHt', -,~ Led by its Leninist ~'l ~,~:,-::.r?';;. C)(!...t·~Av~f';:,.t::<4.~j·L vanguard party, militant ;.j t< ~ jO,~ ~\;, 1J~'A~.Jl.b ~ Russian working class • '~Mi. ~. ~:':J _MD C03blM took leadership of 1917 i'''/:~:1;:,~~,~t1~~ CCCrrlr;? October Revolution. On 18 June 1917, 400,000 Petrograd workers and soldiers demonstrated with Bolshevik slogans: "Long live the Third International!" "Down with the counterrevolution! Down with the ten capitalist ministers! All power to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants Deputies!" 14 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 515, 30 November 1990

h African I etln Left: East London auto workers demonstrate in support of plant occupation. Above: CP leaders Joe Slovo (center) and NUMSA's Moses Mayekiso were brought in by Mercedes-Benz to squelch the strike. South African Labour Bulletin Mercedes-Benz South Africa Sit-Down Strikers Raise Red Flag, CP Sells Them Out When the South African Communist against Mercedes-Benz sums up in a sive apartheid structures." Mercedes­ Party held its first public rally last nutshell what the negotiations are all Benz was determined to smash this July 29, African National Congress about. It also threw South Africa's black example of class-struggle militancy. And leader Nelson Mandela arrived at the sta­ union movement into turmoil, dramati­ the ANC/SACP/COSATU served as their dium near Johannesburg in a bright red cally exposing the "revolutionary" pre­ instruments in disciplining the workers. Mercedes 500 SE armored limousine. tensions of its leaders. And because of The strike was directed against the The car had been built for him specially this, it was downplayed by pro-ANC National Bargaining Forum, set up the by the workers at the Mercedes-Benz media. year before by NUMSA and South plant in East London. The red, they had The Mercedes plant was one of the Africa's auto manufacturers. In 1989, said in presenting it to him, stood for most militant factories in all of South national bargaining had raised the mini­ the blood spilled in the freedom struggle Africa. In a marathon 1987 strike they mum for auto workers to R5.50 an hour. and the "revolutionary alliance" of the won the highest wages in the auto However. for the traditionally militant ANC, the SACP and the COSATU trade­ industry. This gave the workers confi­ Mercedes workers it brought nothing, as union federation. dence and a sense of their strength. A their wages were already above this Two weeks later, the workers at spokesman for MBSA management said minimum. For 1990 they demanded a Mercedes-Benz South Africa (MBSA) that "we have had a factory with worker R3-per-hour raise above the national occupied the plant in a "sleep-in" strike control since 1987. Supervisors used to minimum. This was opposed by Maye­ and ran the ANC and SACP flags up the clock in and then lock themselves in their kiso and the NUMSA tops. company flagpoles. Yet the ANC/SACP/ offices for the whole day. They didn't The union leadership accused the Mer­ COSATU alliance recoiled in horror, for dare go out on the assembly lines." cedes militants of "factory tribalism," the strike threw a giant wrench in their Another MBSA executive complained abandoning "unity" with workers in plans for industrial peace in a "post­ that "a highly organised and politicised other companies. This is a classic ploy apartheid" South Africa. At the company's workforce with very skilled union lead­ of Stalinists and other reformists who request, SACP leader Joe Slovo and Na­ ership had in many respects taken call on the workers to "sacrifice" for the tional Union of Metal Workers (NUMSA) control." Some workers even stood at popular front. Salvador Allende's Un i­ general secretary Moses Mayekiso (also assembly lines with mock AK-47s or dad PopUlar in Chile accused copper a top SACPer) tlew to East London to bazookas strapped to their backs, as a miners of being "privileged" when they tell the strikers to go back to work. "symbol of defiance and rejection of the struck to defend their cost-of-living Strikebreaking on behalf of the "en­ company which many workers believed escalator. Now South African workers lightened" apartheid bosses-the strike was merely an extension of the repres- are being told to sacrifice even before

... _._~_I ..\III.J.-I ...I.I.!III._l-JIlJIIIk~WII""W",," __ ·,,"_ ..... ,..-q ...' ______---,.. "--_ ...... _--,_."."".""",,.. ,,._--"" " 15

the pop front is in office. Extensive post-strike coverage of the struggle at Mercedes- Benz by the South Aji-ic(J La/Jour Bulletin (November 1(90) reports that the movement began among several shop stewards as they traveled to and from the SACP rally in Johannesburg. While apologists for the union tops try to blame it all on the "immature militancy" of a small minor­ Black auto ity, in fact the strike was supported by workers at I R out of the 23 stewards and was voted MercedeS-Benz by a general union meeting on August have been in 16. Two thousand of the factory's 3,500 the forefront of workers began the sleep-in, replacing class struggle the Mercedes star with the red flag with in South Africa. the hammer and sickle. Already on August 21, NUMSA leader Mayekiso spoke to the workers inside the plant. trying to get them to leave with promises that plant-level bargaining could take up somc of their demands; on multinationals to shut down their that capitalists will find acceptable." on September 3, COSATU vice presi­ South African operations. We warned In South Africa today the returning dent John Gomomo and ANC leader against looking to international finance ANC leaders and nouveaux riches in Raymond Mhlaba (both SACP leaders) capital as saviors. and that '"divestment" Soweto are notable for their predilection spoke with the shop stewards. But the could sap the strength of the key force for Mercedes-Benz luxury automobiles. strike continued, although the numbers for freedom, the black proletariat, whose As a result. the nascent layer of well-off inside the plant began to dwindle. unions were strongest in foreign-owned blacks who want to make it into the The company continued to hardline plants like Mercedes. But now that the boss class are popularly known as the it, refusing to grant any increase and ANC and SACP see themselves "sharing tribe of the "WaBenzi." As class divi­ announcing that 53R hard-core strikers power" they'll break strikes to keep the sions sharpen. the WaBenzi join their were fired. For support they went to ANC multinationals sweet. capitalist masters in cracking down on international director Thabo Mbeki, who The Mercedes strike showed in a mi­ the Mercedes-Benz workers. went to the Communist Party. On Sep­ crocosm what the ANC/SACP/COSATU Although the East London strikers tember 20, Mayekiso and SACP general negotiations with De Klerk for a "demo­ were defeated, the black workers of secretary Joe S lovo spoke to thousands cratic" South Africa are all about. South South Africa are combative and restive. of MBSA workers at a church meeting Af;'ica La/Jour Bullctin editor Karl von In the present situation. as reformists hall in the huge Mdantsane township. Holdt summed it up: the anti-apartheid seek deals with the government and Mayekiso warned of the danger of forces are in etlect "abandoning their call companies, strike struggles could spark Mercedes pulling out of South Africa. for disinvestment," and "these organisa­ a wave of worker insurgency through­ Slovo backed the union tops, saying: "It tions are accepting that capitalists have out the country. The issue of proletar­ is not a question of right and wrong. but an important and legitimate role to play ian revolution would be posed, what's of power, of being able to continue in South Africa. They are also accepting needed is a revolutionary party to lead it to victory. _ struggling and making advances." Yet that it is necessary to create conditions it was the stab in the back by the ANC/ SACP/COSATU leaders that sabotaged this struggle. But still the strikers held out until October R. What Strategy for Black Liberation? " In order to end the nine-week struggle which caused them so much embarrass­ Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism ment. the NUMSA tops signed a grovel­ (Marxist Bulletin No.5 Revised) (64 pages) ing agreement pledging themselves to $2.50 the "common objectives of industrial Selected documents and articles on the black question in the US., 1955-1977. peace and stability," the "maintenance of Contents acceptable work and behavior standards" • Preface to Revised Edition • Soul Power or Workers Power? and the "growth and viability of the com­ • Preface to First Edition The Rise anj Fall of the League of pany." The fired workers were out of the Revolutionary Black Workers • For the Materialist Conception of the plant, and the union agreed to assign a Negro Question • Black Power and the Fascists top organizer to East London to keep the • For Black Trotskyism • Black Power-Class Power Mercedes workers in line. Instead of • The Negro Struggle and the Crisis of • Behind the "Roots" Craze militant workers control, which repre­ Leadership • Quotes from Frederick Douglass and sented dual power in the factory, the • The Secret War Between Brother Klonsky Malcolm X Developing a Social company and union intend to implement and Stalin (and Who Won) Conscience West German style "co-determination." • Rise and Fall of the Panthers: End of the • Quotes from "Roots". RomantiCizing Black Power Era an IndiVidual Heritage For years, the ANC/SACP was calling on the imperialists to impose economic Make checks payable/mall to: Spartacist pubnsh'lng Co, Box 1377 GPO. New York, NY 10116 "sanctions" on the apartheid regime, and 16 reprinted /i"Om Workers Vanguard No. 376, 5 April 1985 Nationalism Is a Deathtrap for Black Masses-­ Build a Proletarian Party to Smash Apartheid! South Africa: Razor's Edge On Thursday, March 21, rallies were men!. .. who want a violent settlement, townships throughout the Eastern Cape held in South Africa to commemorate who want trouble in the streets." The region. the 25th anniversary of the massacre at administration's South Africa policy of * * * Sharpeville, the black township near "constructive engagement" was revealed The massacre at Uitenhage was the Johannesburg, where police of the white­ as nothing hut emhracing racist murder. racist regime's answer to eight months supremacist regime mowed down 69 Democratic Senator Teddy Kennedy, of defiant struggles by the oppressed black demonstrators peacefully protest­ meanwhile, joined Republican Secretary black population of South Africa. A mas­ ing the apartheid pass laws. This year of State George Shultz in hypocritically sive boycott last August by the Indian black students in Sharpeville put up denouncing the "evil" of apartheid. and "coloured" (mixed-race) communi­ barricades and boycotted classes. At the In Pretoria, government spokesmen ties doomed Botha's "reform" constitu­ strategic Vaal Reefs gold mine, the hastened to push Reagan's anti­ tion to reinforce apartheid disenfran­ largest in the world, 40,000 black work­ Communist buttons, blaming it all on chisement and provide the executive ers went on strike. And in the Eastern a supposed Soviet plot orchestrated with new martial law powers. Peaceful Cape province after a three-day "stay­ through the banned African National protests of rent increases in black town­ away" shutdown by the black population Congress (AN C). And speaking on ships around Johannesburg were met of Port Elizabeth, the authorities cele­ ABC's Night/ill£' program, Prime Minis­ with police terror and the unprecedented brated Sharpeville by staging another ter P.W. Botha declared, "I am going to introduction of the army. They were fol­ massacre. keep order in South Africa, and nobody lowed by black gold miners battling the In Washington that evening, U.S. is going to stop me." That week 29 police and army in Septemher; In No­ president Reagan vilely excused the po­ black groups, notably the anti-apartheid vember came the massive two-day stay­ lice massacre at Uitenhage, saying that United Democratic Front (UDF), were away general strike in the industrial "rioting was going on" and that among banned from holding any meetings. On Transvaal. In Fehruary, black squatters South African blacks there is "an ele- March 30 the army occupied black at the Crossroads shantytown outside

Durand/Slpa Campbell/Time Uitenhage, South Africa: Massively armed apartheid police state wants bloodbath. Black struggle for freedom needs program for proletarian power. 17

Cape Town erupted in defiance of gov­ ernment plans to move them to an iso­ March 21, 1985 was a hot day in crossfire from automatic weapons lated township far from the city. Even the black township of Langa, near lasting five deadly minutes. After­ though more than 250 blacks have been Uitenhage, site of the big Volks­ wards, police placed stones among killed by Pretoria's security forces since wagen auto plant outside Port Eliza­ the bodies to make it look like the the beginning of 1984, it hasn't stemmed beth. A crowd gathered for the fu­ blacks had been throwing rocks. the waves of revolt. But things cannot neral of an African student activist They claim they killed 19; witnesses go on this way indefinitely. killed by police the previous week. say at least twice as many were South Africa appears to be rumbling They boarded buses for nearby murdered. down the tracks to a bloody confronta­ Kwanobuhle where the funeral On a hill overlooking Langa tion. The system of apartheid-a bogus march was to take place. When po­ township, heavily armed poor partition in which the whites give up lice arrived and ordered them off whites looked down on the slaughter nothing-is coming apart. Blacks have the buses, black men in shirtsleeves, below. They feared the spectre of made it clear that they are not taking women with sunshades and young slave rebellion, wrote a foreign re­ this oppressive situation any more. And children decided to walk instead. porter, their intonation spanning the white population is armed to the Their numbers swelled to 300-500. centuries of Afrikaner history as teeth, determined to defend what they've A "hippo" police armored troop they remarked that the police "did got. The coasts are secure, there is a belt carrier drove through the proces­ the right thing" in shooting down of cowed black African states to the sion, stopped and turned broadside the marchers. "If the blacks had got north, and the struggle is along white­ on a rise up ahead. The funeral­ into the white area it would have vs.-black national lines. So long as the goers then noticed a second "hippo" been much worse" said one. "Sure, national principle predominates, in a coming up behind them. With the some whites would have died, but military confrontation, now and for the first shot, a boy cycling at the head a lot more blacks would have died next period the whites will win hands of the crowd fell dead, his head with them" (New York Times, 25 down. The danger is of a pointless blood­ burst open. Then came a withering March). bath, something on the scale of the partition of India in which hundreds of thousands died, and a very one-sided absorbed, at the bottom, into a modern earth" program which the Zionists can bloodbath in which the vast majority of industrialized society which can, based only dream of imposing on the Shi'ites the victims will be from the oppressed on the revolutionary reorganization of and Druze of Lebanon. black, Indian and coloured majority. society, provide a decent life for its citi­ While the Botha regime is not crum­ Yet the class principle can prevail. In zens. The white population must have a bling, it has plenty of problems which South Africa there is a black proletariat place in an anti-racist society; the model cannot be solved by the sjamhok (whip) with a growing sense of its power. Over is how Trotsky offered thousands of tsar­ and Uzi machine gun. A new generation the past decade it has entered into strug­ ist officers a job to do, placing their skills of urbanized black youth burn with anger gle, from the gold mines and industrial at the disposal of the new Bolshevik re­ at their grossly inferior schooling, lim­ heartland of the Witwatersrand to the gime and the Soviet peoples. South Af­ ited job prospects and the denial of their auto plants of Port Elizabeth. By its very rica's two and a half million coloureds, birthright. Black workers, getting a taste bulk, this five-million-strong working who comprise a strategic part of the Cape of their growing social power, refuse to class has forced the petty-bourgeois proletariat, and the nearly one million continue servilely groveling before the black leadership to take it into account, Indians, mainly a commercial popula­ white haas. With stones and petrol but not programmatically. The black pro­ tion, are no less a vital component. bombs, with boycotts and strikes, the letariat is still being used as cattle to black masses are defying not just the haul the ideological cart of nationalism. * * * pass laws or residential restrictions hut A Bolshevik party must be built to lead South African whites are an oppressor the whole oppressive structure of apart­ a victorious struggle for "amandla," people who can easily and guiltily envi­ heid rule. The South African bourgeoi­ power, for the oppressed, through work­ sion the terms of oppression reversed, sie-the English in the mines and the ers revolution. and are determined not to be on the re­ Afrikaners on the farms-thrived for a Instead of the mass starvation and in­ ceiving end. That makes them extremely century on the slave labor of blacks. Now ternecine tribal strife which have marked dangerous. South Africa is unique. Un­ they need to stabilize a layer of black the "independent" neocolonial states of like Ulster Protestants, Israeli Jews, the skilled workers in industry and to con­ black Africa, proletarian class rule in Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and, formerly, tain the labor militancy of the emerging South Africa will open the way to so­ Cypriot Greeks, where the group on top black unions. cialist construction, based on the higher is not qualitatively, if at all, economi­ In the interests of economic develop­ levels of industry and culture, in which cally advantaged, in South Africa you ment, there has been a quantitative nar­ whites will also have a necessary place. have, in bulk, one whole people exploit­ rowing of the wage gap between white Only such a perspective of a black­ ing another. Ulster is the triumph of ide­ and black workers. Through the Wiehahn centered workers government, through ology over social reality, for Catholic reforms, black unions have been permit­ forging a multiracial working-class van­ and Protestant alike are impoverished ted to organize, though the regime tries guard which struggles for class power, even by the standards of run-down Brit­ to hamstring them with elaborate state can break down the iron white-vs.-black ish capitalism. In the Near East, Pales­ controls. Recently several employer as­ line. tinian Arabs are at most half a social sociations called on the Botha govern­ South Africa is the one place in sub­ revolution behind the Israelis. But the ment to implement its vague promises Saharan Africa where there is the possi­ Afrikaners have the qualitative military, of reform. But government spokesmen, bility for a workers state, because here economic, technical and cultural superi­ representing the verligte ("enlightened") the black population has been partially ority to carry out the bloody "scorched wing of Afrikaner nationalism, replied 18

off the black proletariat that has pro­ duced their golden egg. But their whole security setup is designed for repression on a mammoth scale. They're probably already calculating what Henry Kis­ singer once cynically called the "raped nun gap"-how many atrocities against whites to allow, or instigate, to pre­ pare foreign opinion for the bloody holocaust of blacks. (Recall the Western scare propaganda about raped nuns in Stanleyville which paved the way for the 1961 UN intervention against Lumumba in the Congo, engineered by Teddy Kennedy's elder brother lFK.) And when Botha lets loose it won't just be with Israeli machine guns firing out of gun slits of hippo troop carriers. The black townships were designed for civil war, laid out like giant concentration camps Wide 35,000 black people defiantly marched on 25 March 1985 in funeral for youth encircled by highways and empty "free killed by cops in township near Uitenhage, Cape Province. fire zones," so they can be isolated and, if necessary, napalmed into submission. that "Businessmen should not call for Africa shared by the American bourgeoi­ Pretoria is prepared to impose a peace black political participation without un­ sie and the American "left." What's of the graveyards. derstanding the implications of what posed is not granting token democratic The contradictions of the Botha re­ they were advocating" (Washington Post, rights to an oppressed minority. In South gime can be seen in the gold miners' IS March). What may be economically Africa, a racial caste of 4-5 million strike last September. After careful study rational for segments of the ruling class whites share in the superexploitation of and passing elaborate legislation, the is not politically possible. the 26-plus million blacks, Indians and government had granted a highly cir­ coloureds. An important 1983 ABC-TV cumscribed right to strike. One of the * * * special on the rise of South African black tamer black unions went through all the Sharpeville 1960 brought a decade of unions was titled "Adapt or Die." But procedures and finally declared a first­ police-state silence. All black resistance on the political level, South African rul­ ever legal strike. The Wall Street Journal was crushed. South African society has ers cannot adapt. White supremacy, proclaimed the advent of "enlightened" experienced important changes in the whether in the form of apartheid or by labor relations in South Africa. But as quarter century since then, centrally the some other name, is the foundation of soon as the legal strikers walked off the consolidation of a black working class South African capitalism, just as slavery job, their example spread like wildfire and the beginnings of its organization. was to the pre-Civil War American through the gold mines, and the govern­ What this means is that today treason South. ment responded by sending in the troops trials, mass arrests and the killing of some What does majority rule, "one man, and shooting down unarmed strikers in scores of blacks are insufficient to choke one vote," mean in South Africa? To the cold blood. off black struggle. Two days after the white minority, it can only mean one Uitenhage massacre, a number of black thing: "Drop dead." But they don't want * * * collaborators of the apartheid regime to drop dead, and they hal'£' all the guns. Meanwhile, the power of the black were killed in the townships. And on ABC's Ted Koppel referred to a slogan proletariat is still politically straitjack­ March 24 an estimated 35,000 blacks, painted on a South African wall, "Boer eted by nationalism. And this is no ac­ reportedly the largest demonstration ever go home." But the Boers are home. The cident, for the structure of South African in the Eastern Cape, streamed into Kwa­ Afrikaners see themselves as a "white society subjects the black population nobuhle to tum the funeral that had pre­ tribe of Africa." These trekkers who con­ as a whole to the most hideous forms viously been broken up by the police into quered the veldt (plains) lost the Boer of colonial oppression. They are treated a mass protest. But Botha has made clear War, but they won the country. In con­ as aliens in their own country, without his intention to crush those "fomenting trast to whites in Southern Rhodesia, the legal rights, colonial subjects constantly disobedience, violence and destruction." Afrikaners are not a settler colony any­ threatened with deportation to their The Uitenhage massacre could be the sig­ more. The Rhodesians, like the Israelis kraals on the starving bantustans. The nal for unleashing a Sharpeville many in Lebanon, couldn't afford to lose capitalist class and its state apparatus are thousands of times over. steady casualties, even only ten a entirely white (except for black cops In a recent New York Times (27 March) week-trivial numbers in the abstract, who rarely rise above sergeant). There article, the generally perceptive reporter but not with such a narrow population is no black bourgeoisie in South Africa. Alan Cowell remarked that "Compared base. The Afrikaners, however, have the The very depth and totalitarian nature of with 1960 ... the white authorities [now] weapons, a sufficiently large white popu­ this internal colonialism has tended to seemed adrift, reliant as ever on force, lation, an ideology and the religion, his­ produce a nationalist-populist outlook but unable to provide any other answer tory and bloody-minded determination among the black African masses, includ­ to the questions spawned by their own to prevail. ing the industrial working class. Histori­ troubled racial history .... " This reflects Genocide is not the aim of South Af­ cally, the black struggle has been under a pervasive misunderstanding of South rica's rulers-they hardly want to kill the sway of nationalist formations, prin- 19 cipally the African National Congress. of the hateful system of apartheid." As The black movement in South Africa At the same time, for the black unions, if the City of London and Wall Street, doesn't seem to realize that they're look­ having to deal with economic reality the butchers who slaughtered blacks in ing down the barrel of a cannon that's tends to cut across nationalist principles, the "Mau Mau emergency" in Kenya and being wheeled out to blow them away. and there have even been reports of joint communist guerrillas in Indochina, are They vastly overrate the humanity of white-black union action, such as at the any more humane than Afrikaner leaders their oppressors. Botha & Co. are now Highveld Steel plant where common Malan, Verwoerd and Botha! They're looking for provocations-and they may mass meetings were held (Work in Prog­ just more remote and cool. get them. ANC sources indicate that ress, October 1(84). In meetings of the The "moderate" nationalist ANC talks their guerrillas are shifting their military National Forum, a nationalist coalition of "multiracial democracy," but means strategy from attacking exclusively stra­ rivaling the UDF, exclusion of whites by this a "power-sharing" deal with ele­ tegic installations to "softer" targets, was rejected by leaders of black unions ments of the white racist ruling class, exercising "much less caution about formerly associated with the Black Con­ from the United Party in the 1950s and incurring [white] civilian casualties" sciousness Movement. But politically '60s to the Progressive Federal Party (Work in Progress, February 1985). This, the South African black unions are still today. Meanwhile, Bishop Tutu, picked combined with their talk of moving from inchoate where they are not directly in­ as the black savior of South Africa by sporadic bombings by small commandos tegrated into one or another nationalist the Nobel Prize committee, warns of to "people's war" is a deadly dangerous popular front. the danger of a bloodbath, appealing for fantasy, playing directly into the hands In the case of the ANC, the strategy the intervention of the American impe­ of the Afrikaner hardliners. Any actions of seeking alliances with the more "lib­ rialists. So that in the South African along this line will trigger a monstrous eral" wing of imperialism and its "own" black movement talk of interracialism is slaughter without threatening Pretoria ruling class extends back to its founding. exclusively associated with popular­ militarily. In contrast to such light­ Hoping to exploit the sometimes sharp front do-gooders of the CP/ANC stripe, minded playing at war, well-selected ac­ antagonism between British capital and and those who warn of the danger of a tions by the black workers movement Afrikaner nationalism the ANC sup­ bloodbath turn out to be weepy friends can strike the apartheid system in its ported British imperialism in both the of the Kennedys. The more militant of Achilles heel, its absolute dependence First and Second World Wars. And fol­ the nationalists, such as AZAPO which upon black labor. lowing the savage repression in the wake demonstrated against Teddy Kennedy's Unlike the Bishop Tutus, we do not of Sharpeville, in 1964 ANC leader Lu­ visit to Soweto last January, close their talk of bloodbaths as an excuse to preach thuli appealed to "South Africa's strong­ eyes to the dangers looming over them pacifism and reconciliation with the est allies, Britain and America ... for and harden up the enemy camp, driving apartheid state. Blood will flow in South sanctions that would precipitate the end whites into the Afrikaner laager. Africa: the question is whose blood, when, where, why and how. Certainly there is no solution in South Africa with­ out a civil war. But if it is fought on a SPARTACIST LEAGUE/U.S. LOCAL DIRECTORY purely white-vs.-black, national basis it will be a disaster for the oppressed. One National Office: Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 • (212) 732-7860 only has to look at Angola where a few hundred South African soldiers drove al­ Atlanta Detroit Norfolk most all the way to Luanda before the Box 4012 Box 441043 Box 1972, Main PO Atlanta, GA 30302 Detroit, MI 48244 Norfolk, VA 23501 Cubans intervened to stop them. Boston Los Angeles Oakland * * * Box 390840, Central Sta. Box 29574, Los Feliz Sta. Box 29497 In the United States, the anti-apartheid Cambridge, MA 02139 Oakland, CA 94604 Los Angeles, CA 90029 movement has centered on the slogan of (617) 492-3928 (510) 839-0851 (213) 380-8239 "divestment." This is a call for an inter­ Chicago San Francisco Madison national strike of capital, to force Pre­ Box 6441, Main PO Box 77494 toria to abandon apartheid, whose net Chicago, IL 60680 Box 1492 San Francisco, CA 94107 Madison, WI 53701 result will be to allow some sharp specu­ (312) 663-0715 (415) 777-9367 lators to buy South African shares at a Cleveland New York Washington, D.C. discount. Only after Mondale's igno­ Box 91037 Box 444, Canal St. Sta. Box 75073 minious defeat in the November elec­ Cleveland, OH 44101 New York, NY 10013 Washington, D.C. 20013 tions did black Democrats begin staging (216) 781-7500 (212) 267-1025 (202) 872-8240 symbolic arrests outside the South Afri­ can embassy in order to refurbish their tarnished credentials. When Kennedy TROTSKYIST LEAGUE OF CANADA tried to cash in on the South Africa issue with a visit in January, the Johannesburg Toronto Edmonton Vancouver Financial Mail ran an incredulous head­ Box 7198, Station A PSSE P.O. Box 9605 Box 2717, Main PO. line, "He's teaching us morals'?" Who is Toronto, ON M5W 1X8 Edmonton, AB T6E 5X3 Vancouver, BC V6B 3X2 demanding that the blood soaked Ameri­ (416) 593-4138 (604) 687-0353 can imperialists stop exploiting, Botha Moncton Montreal must be asking. The white racist U.S. PO. Box 563 C.P Les Atriums, BP 32066 ruling class can have "one man, one Moncton, NB E1C 8L9 Montreal, OC H2L 4V5 vote" and sti II keep the hlacks on the hottom. The divestment campaign is an 20

appeal to the "democratic" hypocrisy of mean the overthrow of white-supremacy tarian class struggle, entirely rejecting the mass murderers of My Lai and Hi­ and would sound the death knell for the the charlatan 'anti-imperialist' blocs with the numerous petty-bourgeois 'national' roshima to get their South African ally white ruling class. Those such as Bishop parties of czarist Russia .... to clean up its act. Tutu, the UDF and ANC who preach "Only thanks to this irreconcilahle class For starry-eyed American reformists a "peaceful" end to apartheid through policy was Bolshevism able to succeed exemplified by the Guardian (3 April), moral suasion and "economic sanctions" in the time of the revolution to throw of international finance capital disarm aside the Mensheviks, the Social Revolu­ the Uitenhage massacre "has created a tionaries, the national petty-bourgeois crisis for the apartheid regime, as there the oppressed ideologically in the face parties and gather around the proletariat is a virtually universal disbelief in the of impending catastrophe in which it will the masses of the peasantry and the op­ official version." The mortal danger to overwhelmingly be the blood of the pressed national ities." South Africa's black masses is ignored black masses that flows. -L.D. Trotsky, "On the South African Theses," as they see only "apartheid's agonies." Today hundreds of thousands of black, Writings [1934-35 J But apartheid is not on its death bed, coloured and Indian workers are enrolled and imperialist finger-wagging and pub­ in black unions, which have repeatedly In South Africa today, the construction lic opinion will hardly bring it down. broken through the labyrinth of state of a Bolshevik party based on the black Liberal divestment lobbyist Dumisani controls to unleash mass strike action. proletariat is more urgent than ever, but Kumalo of the American Committee on The economic organization of the black also the possibilities are possibly better Africa cynically remarks: "Every time workers is a necessary condition for the than in the past. The government has a they shoot people in the townships .... It South African workers, but it is not suf­ lot on its plate right now, and its high­ all helps our cause" (Detroit Free Press, ficient. A recent book titled Power' est priority probably isn't tracking down 16 December 1984). The cause of South Black Workers, Their Unions and the inconspicuous red nuclei in the workers Africa's oppressed will not be helped by Struggle for Freedom in South Aji-ica movement. As a result of what has looking to the Teddy Kennedys or other (1984) reports a revealing remark by a happened to government informers in imperialist "saviors." shop steward of a black union in Port the townships in recent months, there The Kennedy liberals who now call Elizabeth: seems to be an involuntary relaxation of security control within the black for "disinvestment" only have tactical "We long for the day when there is ma­ differences with the likes of IBM presi­ jority rule government in South Africa popu lation. dent John Akers, who calls for U.S. and [imprisoned ANC leaderJ Nelson A Leninist-Trotskyist party in South investment, arrogantly claiming that his Mandela is our Prime Minister. But when Africa must be built in irreconcilable that day comes we must have an inde­ struggle against every kind of national­ low-wage non-union operation in South pendent trade union organisation to make Africa can be a model of race relations sure the black workers don't get kicked ism and popular-frontism, counterposing (like his non-union operations in the around simply because our people are in the program of permanent revolution, U.S.!). The pro-imperialist AFL-CIO power." for the emancipation and reconstruction tops go along with this line, parad­ For the oppressed to emerge victorious of the oppressed nation under the dicta­ ing the "Sullivan principles" of equal­ from the inevitable civil war in South torship of the proletariat. A workers rev­ opportunity exploitation by U.S. corpo­ Africa, they must be organized and led olution in South Africa, with its con­ rations in South Africa, while seeking to by a class-conscious vanguard infused centration of industry and wealth, will take over the new black unions before with the understanding that those who be the motor force for the liberation they get "out of hand." labor must rule. of the desperately impoverished black Communists look to the working Continuing Lenin's struggle for inde­ masses throughout the continent. Where class, from Durban to Detroit, as the van­ pendent communist parties in the fight to begin? Now is the time for interna­ guard of the fight for freedom. We hail for a Fourth International, his companion­ tionalist communists, black, coloured, the action of militant Bay Area long­ in-arms Leon Trotsky, founder of the Indian and white, to undertake the con­ shoremen last December who refused Red Army, wrote to his supporters in struction of unobtrusive nuclei, in and for ten days to unload South African South Africa in 1935. Trotsky noted: oriented toward the workers movement, blood cargo, in spite of the sabotage "The Bolshevik Party defended the laying the basis for a multiracial revo­ by the labor fakers and their fake-left right of the oppressed nations to self­ lutionary workers party in the struggle waterboys. International labor solidar­ determination with the methods of prole- to reforge the Fourth International.. ity, against their bosses and ours, is key to the struggle for workers revolution against ReaganlBotha racism.

* * * The savage apartheid dictatorship in South Africa is the result of uneven and combined development in which the lat­ est advances in industry and technology coexist with imposed colonial backward­ ness of the oppressed black masses, con­ demned to suffer the most brutal aspects of serfdom, slavery and tribalism. The most elementary democratic demand or social gain can only be achieved in an anti-capitalist revolutionary context. The English/U PI-Reuters fundamental political right of "one man, Apartheid police prepare to attack black squatters at Crossroads, near one vote"-real majority rule-would Cape Town .

.. _--_._--- 21 reprinted ji-om Workers Vanguard No. 375. 22 March 1985 For Workers Revolution in South Africa! Black Masses Battle Apartheid Repression

Black revolt against apartheid repres­ sion in South Africa took to the streets of Crossroads, the defiant squatters settlement near Cape Town, last month. This tightly organized community of 100,000 black toilers has been a liv­ ing symbol of resistance to the white­ supremacist regime. Under the dictates of apartheid, in which more than 3.5 million blacks have been deported to the starvation poverty of the bantustans since 1960, this community of "illegal" black squatters should not exist. And Pretoria has tricd time and time again to bulldoze its humble shacks, schools and clinics into the dust and deport its Xhosa-speaking inhabitants to the bantustan hellholes of the Ciskei and Transkei. Recently, the Botha regime announced plans to "con sol idate" the Engllsh/UPI·Reulers entire 250,OOO-strong black population Defiant Crossroads residents fight for their homes, face down bloody apartheid living around Cape Town (including police attempt to remove them. those with "legal" residence) into a concentration camp with one access road scrapped. And five days later he pro­ (SACP), both of which have been banned called Khayelitsha where the rents claimed that Crossroads would be rebuilt under Pretoria's draconian "Suppression are too high and the cell-like "homes" as a "legal" black township, albeit with of Communism" act. too small for the desperately impover­ 70 percent of its inhabitants shipped off Among those recently arrested was Al­ ished black workers and their families. to Khayelitsha or the bantustans because hertina Sisulu, the 66-year-old UOF But on February I X Crossroads resi­ of "overcrowding." president who is the wife of former ANC dents took to the streets to protest their general secretary Walter Sisulu. Along threatened removal. They built flaming Free the UDF 16 and All with Nelson Mandela and other ANC barricades out of oil drums, old tires and Anti-Apartheid Prisoners! leaders, Sisulu has languished in South logs. Three thousand protesters battled Whi Ie hlack protesters battled apart­ Africa's torture-chamber and murder­ South Africa's heavily armed, brutally heid's police in Crossroads. apartheid's cell prisons for two decades, serving a racist police for two days with stones security agents were busy busting into life sentence from the "treason" trials and their bare hands. Eighteen blacks 70 offices and homes of the United Oem­ held in the aftermath of the 1960 Sharpe­ were murdered by these apartheid butch­ ocratic Front (UOF) and its supporters. ville massacre. The recent arrests are ers, including two babies only two and Eight leaders of this anti-apartheid coa­ also reminiscent of the notorious treason six months old who suffocated from tear lition were rounded up and jailed on trials growing out of the arrests of 156 gas fumes; nearly 300 were wounded. "treason charges." Together with eight ANC leaders and activists in 1956. In But 2X police vehicles were damaged colleagues arrested last year on similar order to dissipate growing support for and 26 of the racist thugs were injured, charges, they are fighting for their lives. the ANC"s pacifist campaigns against and as a result of their defiance the cou­ The popular-frontist UOF is com­ Illounting apartheid repression in the rageous Crossroads residents once again posed of more than 600 organizations. 1950s, the regime tied up the ANC in have forced Pretoria to back down. On from black unions to merchant groups legal proceedings for five years. Finally February 21 the white-supremacist min­ and sports clubs. The UOF and its in 1961 even apartheid"s own courts ister of "black affairs" (a post akin to liberal-utopian policies of "peaceful found the last 30 defendants innocent. Hitler's minister of "Jewish affairs") change" are backed by South Africa's The roundup of UOF leaders also Gerrit Viljoen indicated that plans to oldest anti-apartheid nationalist organi­ included the leaders of its most impor­ move the residents of Cape Town's zation, the African National Congress. tant trade-union affiliate, the South Af­ three main black townships would be and the allied Stalinist Communist Party rican Allied Workers Union (SAAWU). 22

Dedicated to a policy of non-racialism, SAAWU was formed in March 1979 after splitting with the "hlack conscious­ ness"-inspired Black Allied Workers Union. SAAWU considers itself "as much a mass Illovement as a union" and has heen hcavily involved in anti-apartheid hattles transcending the shopfloor, cspecially against the hrutal oppression of the aparthcid puppets that lord it over thc Ciskei hantustan wherc many SAAWU memhers are forced to live. SAAWU itself split early last year into an East London-hased wing led hy SAAWU president Thozamile Gqweta and a Durhan-based wing led by former SAAWU general secretary Sam Kikine. Workers revolution will avenge Sharpeville massacre, 21 March 1960. Gqweta at 31 is South Africa's most per­ secuted black union leader, having been their own land. In Sharpevillc, a black the factories and mines of the Rand. In detained at least nine times and narrowly township near Johannesburg, 69 un­ mid-September the economic founda­ escaping assassination attempts. He was armed protesters werc brutally mur­ tions of apartheid were shaken as the one of the eight UDF leaders charged dered, another 186 were wounded. Sub­ first legal (under apartheid's corpora­ with "treason" last year. The recent sequently, hoth the ANC and PAC were tist lahor codes) strikc hy hlack gold roundup included Kikine. banned, their leaders hunted down. im­ miners cxploded in battlcs with the The Botha regime is most threatened prisoncd and murdered, anti-apartheid armcd forces. And in early Novemher, by the unions that link the power of labor struggle stilled for a decade. in the most significant action to date, to the more general struggle against But in that decade a mighty giant­ black unions joined with students for a apartheid slavery. evcn if it is under South Africa's six-million-strong black two-day general strike which paralyzed the auspices of the c1ass-collahorationist proletariat-was gaining the strength, the Transvaal industrial helt around UDF. Free Mandela. Sisulu, the UDF 16 organization and self-confidcnce to J ohanneshurg. and all anti-aparthcid prisoncrs! break the chains of apartheid. With the The policc shoot to kill in the town·· developmcnt of a na~cent but potentially ships. Black union and anti-apartheid Avenge Sharpeville Through explosive black union movement, the leaders are jailed. But the apartheid rul­ Workers Revolution! thundcr of the 1973 Durban strikes broke ers hesitatc at trying to hehead the black the post-Sharpeville silence. And last union movement for fear of proletarian The UDF was formed August 1983 in year township protests spilled over into upheavals which would shatter apartheid opposition to a new white-suprcmacist slavery. They cannot escape thcir depen­ constitution which elevatcd apartheid's dence on black lahor. It is the spectre of South Africa's Black Homelands fUhrer P. W. Botha to "Executive Presi­ workers revolution that frightens the rac­ [=:J K ... aZu1u J 8060 000 Source· Move Your Shadow dcnt" with dictatorial powers. At the c:::J rraf1~kpl - 2 ~OO 000 by Joseph Lelyveld ist rulers. not only in Pretoria. but also same time, to divide South Africa's rrm l.eboWd ? U4.0 000 mIIIIBuphulhalSw

split-off from the ANC, called a nation­ Port E;lizab

" 23 for popular resistance while repression led by the "black consciousness" Aza­ slavery of South Africa's gold and dia­ only fans the flames of revolt. Hence the nian People's Organisation (AZAPO) mond mines. And under the boot of Pre­ apparent zigzags of the racist apartheid carrying placards with slogans like "So­ toria's economic domination, Machel regime. cialist AZAPO vs. Capitalist Kennedy" has been turned into a policeman for Thus, on the one hand, recent state­ (see "Black South African Militants Pro­ apartheid while Pretoria-backed Mozam­ ments from sections of the ruling class test Imperialist Swine," Young Spartacus bique "contras" wreak havoc on that that it will be necessary to negotiate with No. 124, February 1985). We solidarize country's desperately poor and backward the ANC and rumors of talks in the with AZAPO's just denunciations of this economy. offing, P. W. Botha's "offer" to release hypocritical imperialist politician, which Throughout the African continent, ravaged by centuries of colonialism and imperialism, the questions of democracy and genuine emancipation are integrally linked to a socialist reconstruction of society. Given the weakness, politically as well as socially, of the proletariat in most of the balkanized states of sub-Saharan Africa, "independence" has meant imperialist-dominated bonapartist UDF rally dictatorships based on tribal genocide, celebrates mass famine and pestilence. Given the successful tremendous social power of South Afri­ boycott ca's black proletariat, it can command a of sham parliament better future for itself, and be the motor elections. force for social revolution throughout the continent. But to do this it must, through the forging of an international­ ist, Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard, over­ come its own tremendous political back­ Mandela and talk with the ANC if they left bourgeois commentators worrying wardness which is in inverse relation to will only renounce "violence"-these over the chord of hostility to capitalism its potential social power. would have been unthinkable five years that they struck among black South The root cause of this backwardness ago. Clearly their aim is to exploit the Africans. lies iri South Africa's peculiar internal liberal illusions of the ANC (whose own colonial structure, the product of uneven "Freedom Charter" calls for a form of For Permanent Revolution and combined development. The dispos­ "power-sharing" that virtually guaran­ in South Africa! session through war of African land laid tees white economic supremacy, i.e., the Given the clear strategic importance the basis for permanently settled Euro­ maintenance of capitalist rule) and the and social power of South Africa's black pean popUlations to organize on a mass prestige of the ANC's courageous proletariat, all these nationalist groups scale a huge, migratory, superexploited decades-long struggle against apartheid, pay lip service to it. Thus, the UDF hails and hideously oppressed black labor in order to split and co-opt a neocolonial "the leadership of the working class in force. The black toilers confront a ruling and comprador wing. But Mandela de­ the democratic struggle for freedom." class and tyrannical police state which fiantly rejected Botha's "offer" with a ANC president Oliver Tambo declares: is white. Given the extent to which op­ challenge: "Let him renounce violence. "the offensive of the working class is, pression is shared by all strata of the Let him say that he will dismantle apart­ and must be, an integral part of the na­ black population it is relatively easy for heid." Botha's answer was "treason" ar­ tional liberation struggle." AZAPO and them to be held under the sway of a rests of eight more leaders of the UDF, its allies in the eclectic National Forum nationalist agenda limited to the amelio­ which explicitly repudiates "violence," grouping call in the Manifesto of the ration or elimination of white minority and the racist rampage of his apartheid Azanian People for a "democratic anti­ rule. thugs in Crossroads. These actions are racist worker Republic." What each of Yet economism, including its "left" the fruits of Reagan's "constructive en­ these groups has in common is they want variants, which divides the struggle for gagement" which emboldens Pretoria's to use the proletariat as cannon fodder proletarian self-organization from the savage repression. in the service of an alien class program. more general struggle against apartheid Teddy Kennedy's recent grandstand­ .The ANC wants to give South Afri­ repression in all of its manifestations, is ing tour of South Africa was part of the can imperialists a democratic facelift, as much an obstacle to the proletariat strategy of "liberal" imperialism which, turning Harry Oppenheimer and Anglo becoming what Marx called a political seeing the writing on the wall for apart­ American into "equal opportunity" ex­ "class for itself" as are the nationalists. heid, seeks to distance itself from the ploiters. AZAPO and more radical na­ The urgent necessity is for the black, regime and cultivate credible and "mod­ tionalists want to displace the Harry coloured and Indian proletariat of South erate" black leaders who can one day Oppenheimers with a petty-bourgeois Africa to crystallize its communist keep the country safe for continued ex­ elite that aspires to exploit its own pro­ vanguard based on the program which ploitation. Kennedy was invited by letariat. It is indicative that AZAPO links the struggle for national emanci­ anti-communist Nobel "Peace" Prize holds up Mozambique as a model. But pation to its own proletarian dictatorship winner Bishop Desmond Tutu, a patron Samora Machel's Frelimo has only dis­ and which sees the smashing of apart­ of the UDF, and his visit was welcomed placed the Portuguese colonialists as heid as the road to workers revolution­ by the ANC, which met with him-but labor contractors selling Mozambique the program of Trotsky's Permanent his steps were dogged by demonstrators toilers into the superexploited semi- Revolution. _ 24 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 380, 31 May 1985

Smash the Whole Apartheid Slave System! Interracial Sex Ban Jolted in South Africa On April 15 the racist South African apartheid regime announced that it will repeal the Immorality Act and the Mixed Marriages Act which make interracial sex and marriage "crimes." These laws, like all the barbaric institutions of apart­ heid slavery, are concentrated and codi­ fied expressions of the chauvinism and racial oppression endemic to the decay­ ing imperialist order. South African ra­ cism is unique, for not only does the color line determine who is on top and who is on the bottom-here an entire people oppresses and benefits from the exploitation of another. To consolidate the oppression of a people or prepare their extermination, strict separation must be enforced; ties of blood and deep Cape Town emotion must be cut to delineate what couple Sylvia Hitler called the Herrenvolk ("master Vollenhoven and race"). But the inevitability of interracial Bob Sedon, with their son Ryan. sex and marriage bonds within a com­ Interracial sex mon species is a fundamental challenge and marriage to every "master race" dogma, and a pro­ challenge found assertion that all races are equal precepts of and indissolubly mixed. apartheid. Therefore, it is out of considerations of elementary human decency that we as Marxists hail the repeal of vile meas­ ures which seek to regiment and sup­ press the most deeply felt human emo­ tions. Of course, we fully recognize that marriage are particularly explosive be­ ments," and where even the leadership this legislative measure does not touch cause they contradict the basic precepts of the peaceful, multiracial anti-apart­ the fundamental question of power in of apartheid. heid United Democratic Front (UDF) is white-supremacist South Africa. Nor The repeal of the Immorality and on trial for treason? will it mean that the estimated thousands Mixed Marriages Acts is a calculated The South African laws forbidding of mixed couples who have been living political move by the Pretoria regime of interracial sex and marriage are reviled in the shadows are now suddenly free President P. W. Botha. His policy has around the world and by repealing them of the discrimination, humiliation and been to make certain cosmetic refonns Botha gives the Reagan administra­ racist violence which is inseparable from in the institutions of apartheid which tion a sop to justify Washington's pro­ apartheid. In a recent interview with a leave intact the white-supremacist power apartheid "constructive engagement." At handsome interracial couple the New structure based on the superexploitation the same time Botha seeks to give credi­ York Times (30 April) quotes Sylvia of black labor. Take for example the bility to his widely discredited coloured Vollenhoven: "We're not going to go May 25 announcement that the prohibi­ and Indian parliaments. The repeal af­ straight out and hold hands in the Wimpy tion of multiracial political parties is fects primarily whites and coloureds, as Bar in [Cape Town Afrikaner suburb] to be dropped. How much does such a apartheid's brutal and all-sided segrega­ Bellville .... [As a mixed couple 1 you "reform" mean in a country where the tion of blacks minimizes their social in­ tend to chart a very safe route through black majority is completely disenfran­ teraction with whites. As with his puppet life." But it is a good thing when you chised, where "coloureds" (mixed-race) parliaments, Botha's announced repeal get the cops out of the bedroom, and in and Indians may "vote" only for com­ of these laws is a continuation of the racist South Africa interracial sex and pletely powerless, segregated "parlia- age-old colonial strategy of divide and 25

c conquer. But while not changing the ba­ .9 o sic fact of white domination and black z enslavement upon which apartheid is S based, the repeal of these laws chal­ s: lenges its very rationale. The Color Bar in America When American reporters quote Win­ nie Mandela's rhetorical question, "In f what other society do people need to leg­ Nazis parade islate against their own urges'?" (New woman through I York Times, 16 April), they show their the streets for short historical memory by implying this "crime" of sex is uniquely South African. Not only do with a Jew. the Immorality and Mixed Marriages Acts deserve comparison to the Nazis' 1935 Nuremberg laws, which forbade marriage and sex between Jews and "Aryans"; there is a comparison which is closer, and closer to home: the anti­ ualliaison of a white woman and a black society in which !,ains for black people miscegenation laws of the United States. man. This crossing of color and Chl'>S are all too reversible. The anti-miscege­ In 1962, Lerone Bennett, Jr. noted in lines (especially in a slaveholdin!, -.;oci­ nation laws wen: already repealed once Before the Mayflower that "twenty-two ety) above all violates the \vhite before, during Reconstruction. the pe­ states still forbid interracial marriages." woman's subordinate role in patriarchal rioel or democratic !,aim for blacks won In addition to barring marriages be­ society as the passive, "pure" bearer of by the Ci\il War. In thl' era of .Iilll Cro\\ tween whites and blacks, California and heirs. The central function of the mo­ reaction which followed. those law,: most of the Western states banned mar­ nogamous family, and woman's role were reinstated, often in harsher form. riages between whites and Asians. The within it, is to be literally a transmission Indeed, the courts in America are ~till formal elimination of these laws was belt for the inheritance of private prop­ punishing interracial sex: in Georgia in completed by the Supreme Court only erty to the next generation. The "honor" 19X2 Kathy Blackburn, a working-class as a result of the civil rights movement, of white women so assiduously defended white woman, had her whitt' ,on taken in 1967. by the lynchers is based on the embodi­ away by the court after she had a baby Indeed the tradition regarding "mis­ ment of private property in slaves de­ daughter with a black man. It was a cegenation" in much of South Africa's fined by the color line. chilling punishment for a white woman history was not as harsh as that of the Capitalist America is a deeply racist stepping over the color line. The judge antebellum American South. In the South African slave society of the 18th century. and even until the middle of this Between 1949 and 1971 there were into exile, separation of parents from century in the Cape province, the lighter children, forgery, non-support of the complexions of those of mixed race over 17,000 prosecutions under Sec­ tion 16. the race clallse, of the Im­ children. and the greater their wealth, the more morality Act apartheid South Africa's freely they were allowed to "pass" into I Most known suicides have been law making interracial sex a crime). white society without too many ques­ white men-----many of them middle Subsequent prosecutions would bring tions being asked. In the American South aged plattelanders Irural white Afri­ the total to o\'er 2(),()(JO .... the "one drop" rule was widely applied, kaners jthreatened with charges under condemning those with just a "touch of Police officers hiding in the boots the Act. One of the seven men accused the tarbrush" to servitude. [trunks] of cars, in the ceilings of in Excelsior, the Free State town Already in the American colonial pe­ homes, perching up trees-all in the which won notoriety in IlJ70 as a re­ sult of the Immorality Act, committed riod, Bennett reports that "sensing a de­ cause of obtaining photographic or terioration of slavery if the barriers be­ other evidence of sex between two suicide .... tween masters and slaves were dissolved people of different colour-became At least one young white woman in the equalitarian crucible of sexual in­ part of the curious heritage of [South had her seven-month-old baby re­ timacy, they [racial purists] sought to Africa]. moved because it was not white and stop racial crossing by statute." The first The .practice of police-feeling th~ had the infant used in court to con­ such law, passed in Maryland in 1664, warmth of the bed, searching for hairs demn her and her lover because of was "aimed at white women who had on the bed linen, confiscating stained the dark skin it had inherited. And the resisted every effort to inoculate them sheets, subjecting their suspects to very presence of the Immorality Act with the virus of racial pride." This was examinations by the District Sur­ has left hundreds of black and col­ no accident-there is a deep link be­ geon-were common knowledge. By oured women bearing children of tween the oppression of women, of the early '70s the tally of 34 morals their white lovers-and quite unable classes and of races. White men's sexual cases a week in the Johannesburg to claim maintenance because they access to black women is essentially magistrate's court was regarded as would have to reveal a "criminal" taken for granted in racist America. But "normal." ... [The results of the Im­ conception. the crime of crimes, the act that sets off morality Act j have included a string -AIRIl.l' (Cape Town, South the hysterical fury of the Ku Klux Klan of ,uicides. countiess coup'les driven Africa), I() April Il)~) and lynch mobs in the South, is the sex- 26 editorialized out of court, "How would slaves and indigenous Khoi servants. were implicated and one committed sui­ you like to have a female relative living The previous 1927 Immorality Act cide. After that the rate of prosecutions with a black man and having a child? I which had prohibited intercourse be­ fell off significantly. personally am opposed to it" (New York tween white and African was amended Along with all the racist violence and Times, 18 February 1982). to prohibit it between whites and all non­ degradation of apartheid, South Africa whites. The entire population was ra­ is by and large a miserably provincial The Nightmare of the "Volk" cially classified. "Questionable cases" place, lorded over by an Afrikaner ver­ A crucial strand in the web of racism were summoned before official panels sion of the Moral Majority: no movies which envelops South Africa originates to have pencils stuck in their hair (to on Sundays; no lying closer than 18 in the embattled history of the Afrikan­ distinguish a frizz from a curl), the inches to each other by the pool if you're ers, the majority of the South African widths of their noses measured, and so in the misnamed Orange Free State prov­ whites. In the 19th century their Boer on. South Africa's white English "liber­ ince; the book Black Beauty once banned ancestors hacked out a piece of Africa als" of the United Party stripe, more because of its title. In short the concen­ for themselves against the more numer­ pragmatic racists, differed only in af­ tration of cultural, sexual and racial re­ ous indigenous tribes. In terms of social firming that whites had enough "race pression could hardly be more volatile. development, Bibles and guns barely di­ pride" not to require laws to keep them No wonder interracial sex has been an vided one cattle-herding people from the from "miscegenating." essential theme among white South Af­ rican writers. Andre Brink seems fixated on the subject. Alan Paton uses it to show hypocritical racist ideologues with their pants down. J.M. Coetzee lays bare with his grim intensity the relationship of an Afrikaner farm woman with a black fore­ man. James McClure's hardened detec­ tives trace multiple threads of sexual and interracial antagonism and entanglement in their investigations. Breyton Breyten­ bach, the best living writer in Afrikaans, first turned against the volk in a major way by marrying a Vietnamese woman and emigrating, perforce, to Paris. He was later convicted of returning incog­ South Africa nito to South Africa to launch an under­ blacks burn ground white support group for the strug­ pass book, gle to smash apartheid. mark of slavery. The very existence of the coloureds is a constant reminder to the South African racists of the lie of "white­ supremacy." An Afrikaans scholar, Dr. Hans Heese, himself descended from a mixed family, is being sued left and right for libel by outraged Afrikaners for a book in which he shows that many lead­ other. After being militarily crushed by But, like racists everywhere, the Af­ ing Afrikaner families, including the British imperialism's war to seize the rikaner nationalists' war for "purity" was Bothas and Treurnichts, are of mixed gold fields at the turn of the century, the a war against themselves and their own descent. Several Bothas sit in the South Boers were economically driven to the history. In the U.S. slave South, it was African apartheid regime's cabinet and cities. Here they competed with blacks said, "th~re is not an old plantation in Andries Treurnicht is head of the for laboring jobs, while at the same time which the grandchildren of the owner Conservative Party, an ultraright split­ possessing the white skin privilege of are not whipped in the field by the over­ off from the ruling Nationalists which the right to vote. seers" (Before the Mayflower). In South decries Botha's repeal of the Immorality These were the conditions in which Africa, history has really taken revenge. Act as a sellout of the white man. the fascistic Afrikaner nationalist move­ One ardent supporter of passing the Im­ Botha now speaks for a Cape-based ment grew. Coming to power in 1948, morality Act, a minister of the sternly tendency in Afrikaner nationalism which the Afrikaner nationalists took charge of Calvinist Afrikaans Dutch Reformed sees the coloureds as "brown Afrikaners" a system of segregation whose founda­ Church (which provided scriptural sanc­ who must be brought into the fold so tions had been laid block-by-block under tion for the act) turned out to be one of they can stand on the white side of the the auspices of British imperialism over the first to be prosecuted! He is widely line against the vast majority of 22 mil­ the preceding decades. The Afrikaners remembered in a couplet: "Beneath those lion blacks. Today this seems a vain moved quickly to tighten the existing dark and somber britches/Dwelt some dream, as is shown by the coloureds' system to totalitarian intensity. Reflected dark, uncontrollable itches." Thousands massive rejection of Botha's puppet par­ in the Immorality and Mixed Marriages of subsequent prosecutions left a trail of liament. Further, this repeal of the racial Acts was a new harshness toward those destruction among god-fearing Afri­ sex bar poses some awkward anomalies of mixed race, the coloureds, who are kaner nationalists. A turning point finally for apartheid: In a society where resi­ largely descended frorp unions between came in the rural Afrikaans town of Ex­ dential areas are segregated by law, white colonials and their Indonesian celsior, when several leading citizens where will the legalized mixed couples 27

what I hold as a political ideology and sofar as this confrontation takes place my personal life .... I'm still highly sus­ solely along race lines it will be a bloody peet," she said (New York Times, 12 Sep­ disaster for the oppressed. But the Achil­ tember 19X4). Antagonism to interracial les' heel of apartheid is its absolute de­ marriages among blacks is in part an pendence on black labor and in South expression of the long accumulated and Africa, with its six-million-strong prole­ understandable bitterness of blacks to­ tariat, the class principle can prevail. ward what Lerone Bennett, Jr. called Hundreds of thousands of black workers "the one-way prerogatives of the white are coming together with a coloured pro­ male." Much of what interracial sex letariat, Indians and even some coura­ there is is exacted by the white haas geous whites like martyred union organ­ from his black female servants, or takes izer Neil Aggett, in a burgeoning union place between white men and black movement. This development lays the women in whorehouses on the edge of basis for the construction of a multiracial till' bantustans and neighboring black proletarian vanguard party based on the statelets. (A similar pattern exists in the understanding that those who labor must American South,) rule. As Marxists and revolutionary inte­ As proletarian internationalists we grationists we fight for a socialist society fight against all forms of national op­ in which "race mixing" is the free ex­ pression. Every people has a right to ex­ Ci1IJeeil/Savannah"'" Mornlrlg Kathy Blackburn with daughter. pression of genuine and all-sided social ist but no people has the right to oppress Georgia courts snatched white son eljuality among all peoples. Hostility to another. If the oppressed are to achieve (in photo behind). interracial sex and marriage politically genuine emancipation in South Africa, gcneralized by black nationalists repre­ a black-centered workers government live'l How will children be educated? sents acquiescence in the racist status must struggle to plaee in its service the Treurnicht's ultraright supporters have a quo and/or a program for race war. technical, scientific and administrative point when they ask: How can one allow South Africa is rumbling down the skills of the white population. As for the people of di ffcrent races to sleep to­ tracks to civil war with the whites armed eventual assimilation of the whites into gether and have children, how can one to the teeth and determined not to give the far greater black popUlation in a post­ integrate more public facilities, without up anything and defiant blacks deter­ apartheid socialist South Africa, that is eventually recognizing equal political mined not to submit any more to the a possible development which we would rights for all in a non-racial South Afri­ sjamhok (whip) of apartheid slavery. In- in no way oppose._ ca'! This is but one cxpression of the crisis into which Afrikaner nationalism, and white rule generally, have heen thrown by the fundamental challenge of Women and"'Revolution rising black power centered in the Journal of the Women's Commission of the Spartacist League/U.S. millions-strong black working class. For a Multiracial Working-Class Vanguard Party! The liberal reformists who support the African National Congress simply dis­ miss the repeal of the ban on interracial sex and marriage, saying the South Af­ rican government must show itself "will­ ing" to make basic changes, Dr. Nthato Motlana, a black leader in the township of Soweto, said outright: "We are not interested in the repeal of these laws" (S()we/af/, 16 April). We recognize the Islam, lifting of the bar as a democratic gain South Africa to be defended and extended like all oth­ and ers: at the same time we have no illusions The Satanic that the apartheid state can be pressured into making fundamental changes in its Verses society, which necessarily rests on the enforced segregation of blacks as a su­ No. 31, Spring 1986 No. 37, Spring 1990 perexploited working class. $.50 (24 pages) $1 (48 pages) "In radical black terms," said Sylvia Featuring: Black Women Featuring: Islam, South Africa Vollcnhoven in an interview last year. in South Africa and The Satanic Verses "it's a sellout to marry a white because it makes the ,.,(lCiety look normal." In ------Subscriptions: $3/3 issues ------­ fact. it exposes the insanity of apartheid. Order from/make checks payable to: Her decision to marry a white English­ Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116, USA man "was a cri.,is of conscience between 28 ~------Ii'/Jlillfed .Ii mil Workers Vanguard No. 387, 20 Septemher 1985 Behind South Africa's Financial Crisis Wall Street and the Apartheid State rhc promincnt white South African libL'I;d I klen Suzman recently observed Beating down the Rand that 1m OIiC has to call for divestment Rand against the dollar ;lflYlllurC. It's already happening. For­ 18 ei,UII ill\'l'StorS do not want to touch on co ~ SOllth Alrica right now. The bloodsoaked Q. lalisl apallheid state has been hit by a 20 1ll

tllne of S2 billion. They even threatened 28 hecanl/Busmess Week to ,viz.' the loreign assets of Nedbank, South African rand plunges as capital J F M A M J J A South i\ frica's largest domestically flees. 1985 owned bank. if it did not meet its inter­ Source: The Economist lI,lt iOllal obi igations. Street economist put it, "At the first sign in a six-million-strong black proletariat, Injll';t a few weeks David Rockefeller of trouble, locally held funds move out" stripped of every democratic and human <111.1 hi, fellow bankers have upset the (Business Week, 26 August). And no one right, its own gravedigger. The wealth S"lIth African economy far more than doubts that South Africa is in big trouble. of South Africa belongs not to the capi­ dl'L',ldes of activity by the divestment/ To be sure, no one who looks at the talists-the Wall Street, Frankfurt and '.. lIll,tioll'; lobby, "We are being asked situation soberly also doubts that the London bankers or Johannesburg mine tp pay all our debts in a minute-no white-supremacist regime can drown in magnates-but to the toilers who created ; IHllltry can do that," exclaimed the chief blood a black upheaval at this time. But it. And the only kind of "divestment" \"('(,IIOlllisl of Anglo American Corp., in the longer run international capital is that will benefit the exploited and op­ illl' gi:lIlt mining and industrial con­ deeply pessimistic about the future-and pressed will be proletarian revolution, "I('II1('rate in South Africa. After tempo­ not just the distant future-of the apart­ and the expropriation of these riches by /;,;;Iy ~,hlltting down both the stock ex­ heid state. Foreign investors ask them­ a black-centered workers government as ,i1.lllge and foreign-exchange markets. selves: "How much longer can a privi­ part of a socialist federation of southern 1'll'l(lI ia announccd a four-month freeze leged caste of 4.5 million whites totally Africa. ,'II ihe Il'paymcnt of principal on its subjugate and hideously superexploit 26 The spectre of communism in South "~"~ I I) IIi II ion in foreign bank debt. As if million black Africans, coloureds [peo­ Africa also haunts Wall Street. South Af­ II,,' rcplesented somc bankrupt Third ple of mixed race I and Indians?" Sooner rica: Time Running Out was the title of \\'mld n:gillle, the head of South Africa's or later, they figure, the white police an influential 1981 study commissioned l,'liI(,d hank jOllrneyed hat-in-hand to state is going to crack, and after that the by the Rockefeller Foundation. The l,dlld,lIl and Washington, pleading with deluge ... possibly a descent into anarchy commission was headed by Ford Foun­ iIdl'llI!; 1il:Lllhl' country. As one Wall paraphrase Marx, apartheid has created Europe have convinced themselves, in

, "'. 29 the face of South African realties, that there is a reformist solution which will preserve their interests. Thus the Rocke­ feller Foundation study urges the U.S. government "to promote genuine politi­ cal power sharing in South Africa." However, these days South African Miners fired "power-sharing" futures are selling at a during recent South African large discount on Wall Street and other mine strike. Western financial centers. The attitude International of international capital toward South Af­ monetary rica is, let's get what we can while we system rests can. Business Week (23 September) re­ on blood and ports: "In the face of escalating strife sweat of black and the deaths of more than 700-mostly gold miners. blacks-since rioting broke out a year ago, nearly every American corporation in the country has an escape plan." For­ capitalism and, indeed, the international refreshing places where profits are great eign capital in South Africa is highly and problems are small. Capital is not volatile and invested in ways designed monetary system rests upon the naked back of the black African miner, who threatened by political instability or na­ to minimize the risk when time finally tionalization. Labor is cheap, the market does run out for the apartheid state. daily risks being killed or maimed dig­ is booming, and the currency hard and ging in 110° F heat and darkness of the convertible." The Land Where Gold Is King deep pits, who when not working lives -quoted in Martin 1. Murray, in males-only barracks under prison-like ed., South Aji-ican Capitalism While South Africa is the only indus­ and Black Political Opposition conditions, who faces being sent back (1982) trialized country in sub-Saharan Africa, to starve in the bantustan hellholes at in one fundamental way its role in the any show of resistance. The 1960s and early '70s marked the world capitalist economy is similar to Thus the threat of black revolt triggers golden age, so to speak, of apartheid that of a backward Third World country. international financial panic. This is the capitalism. Since then troubles have It is an exporter of raw materials and an third time South Africa has experienced increasingly accumulated for the Rand­ importer of manufactured products. And massive capital flight. The 1960 Shar­ lords and their partners on Wall Street one raw material quite dominates the peville massacre provoked militant na­ and in the City of London. In early 1973 economy: gold. It accounts for 50 per­ tionwide protests and mass stayaway the black working class shattered the cent of South Africa's foreign-exchange strikes. The African National Congress police-state calm as the city of Durban earnings and almost 20 percent of its (ANC) abandoned passive resistance and was paralyzed by a mass strike. The gross national product. As gold goes, so attempted armed insurrection. It looked rising level of workers' struggles con­ goes the South African economy. When for a moment like the long-anticipated verged with a new generation of black the price of gold plunged from $850 an black uprising was at hand. A billion dol­ student militants in the 1976 Soweto up­ ounce in 1980 to less than $500 an ounce lars was withdrawn from the country in rising. Mass stay away strikes in solidar­ in 1983, hitting a low of $285 earlier the space of weeks. The apartheid state ity with the rebellious black youth em­ this year, apartheid capitalism plunged faced the worst balance-of-payments cri­ braced 70-80 percent of the labor force into the worst depression in 50 years. sis in its history. resident in Soweto, whose two million It is, above all, a golden chain which In 1960, U.S. imperialism came to the inhabitants make it the largest city in binds the apartheid state to Wall Street, aid of its beleaguered South African ally sub-Saharan Africa. At the height of the the City of London, Frankfurt and Zu­ . by arranging emergency loans from the unrest capital once again fled the coun­ rich. South Africa supplies world capi­ International Monetary Fund (IMF). But try. And Washington once again pumped talism with 60 percent of that commodity it was not timely IMF loans which re­ money into South Africa via the IMF, Marx called "the universal medium of stored foreign investor confidence, how­ almost half a billion dollars, to quiet payment" and "the universal cmhodi­ ever, it was the crushing of all resistance down the panicky financial markets. ment of wealth." For a century the rich to white racist rule. Eleven thousand The Soweto rebellion inspired a ris­ veins of gold on the Witwatersrand and militants were arrested and every major ing line of black resistance on almost supercxploitcd black African labor have anti-apartheid organization, including all fronts, most importantly the emer­ been a powerful magnet attracting cap­ the ANC and Stalinist Communist Party, gence of a black workers movement. Tn ital-originally British, in the post­ was driven underground, their leaders 1979 the official Wiehahn Commission war period increasingly American-to killed, imprisoned or forced into exile. warned that black unions "can unite southern Africa. The dominant mining In the decade following Sharpeville a with other unions through affiliation (as company, Harry Oppenheimer's Anglo totalitarian police state reigned supreme is happening now) without government American Corp .. is well named, since over the defenseless, atomized and de­ approval and thus embrace strategic half of it is owned hy Englishmen and industries which can be paralyzed at any moralized black masses. ~his was the Americans. Fifty percent of the stock of perfect climate for foreign investment, given moment." the seven mining groups which control which poured into the country. In 1972 At the same time, another fundamen­ South African gold production is in the the U.S. business magazine Fortune tal contradiction of apartheid capitalism hands of foreign investors (or was until wrote: came to the fore. Industrial expansion they started selling otllike crazy a few "The Republic of South Africa has al­ was blocked by a growing shortage of months ago J. ways been regarded by foreign investors skilled workers, traditionally and legally The enormous wealth of apartheid as a gold mine, one of those rare and restricted to the white labor aristocracy. 30

In 1979 the Chamber of Mines projected that by 1982 there would be a shortage of 50,000 skilled artisans throughout the economy. But to scrap the industrial color bar and develop a large pool of skilled black workers would enormously strengthen the increasingly powerful and combative black labor movement. Apartheid Capitalism in Depression South Africa's manufacturing sector stagnated in the late 19705, but the effect was offset and partially masked by the inflationary hoom in gold. Then the hot­ tom fell out for the South African econ­ omy. As monetarism/austerity swept Western capitalism-Reagan's America, Thatcher's Britain, Mitterrand's France, Kohl's West Germany-the price of gold plummeted. The world depression also hit South Africa's other metal exports (e.g., platinum, manganese). And to make matters worse, a severe drought has devastated agriculture throughout Panicked apartheid regime closes sub-Saharan Africa. Johannesburg stock exchange as Black unemployment in South Africa black revolt continues to spread. soared to over 20 percent of the labor amused at the effects of Bothanomics. ing by 20 percent. Overall, direct U.S. force. The hideous poverty of the town­ Bankers denounced the regime for bor­ investment has fallen from $2.8 billion ships became even more so. Famine and rowing abroad to pay inflated govern­ in 1981 to $2.3 billion. The conservative disease ravaged the bantustans. Even ment salaries. The Business Times de­ London Economist (30 March) observed white South Africa did not escape the manded, "hack the puhlic service." The with its usual cynicism: effects of the economic crisis. At the liberal Rand Daily Mail (which has since "Disinvestment pressure has come at a lower end of the white caste, unemploy­ folded) editorialized: convenient time for many American cor­ porations, as profitability in South Africa ment reappeared for the first time in "Wishful apartheid thinking lies at the decades. At the upper end, well-to-do falls and the Far East looks a more at­ root of our economic misery. The gov­ tracti ve market.... Managers have thus ernment is taking too much money from families now hired their black servants heen able to reduce new capital flows to the productive sectors of the economy to on a part-time basis as an economizing South African subsidiaries while holding measure. pump into that overweight, overpaid, onto market share, milking their profits inefficient monolith that was created to and satisfying anti-apartheid lobbyists." The Botha regime responded to the administer the disastrous policies of the d::pression with a racist version of [rulingJ National Party." The notion of rad-lib activists that Keynesian deficit spending. The govern­ -quoted in Wall Street Journal, divestment means multinationals will ment budget jumped from 22 percent of S February no longer profit from apartheid displays gross national product in 1981 to 29 per­ The Botha regime responded to these a woeful ignorance of how capitalism cent in 1984. Needless to say, this vastly business pressures by imposing a mone­ works. Foreign companies can sell off increased expenditure did not go to the tarist/austerity program last year, driving every last asset and still continue to black masses starving on the bantustans. interest rates to a historic high of 25 superexploit South Africa's black work­ Rather billions of rands were pumped percent anci further depressing the worst ers. A major business enterprise, a large into the growing military sector, fueled depression in 50 years. factory or big bank, for example, is by the war in Namibia; to subsidize the The depression naturally also affected almost never sold for cash. It is usually drought-stricken Afrikaner farmers (the the multinationals operating in South paid for with interest-hearing notes. And original Boers); and to increase the sala­ Africa. The return on direct foreign when profits are at depression-level lows ries of civil servants by 30 percent. The investment slid from 20 percent at the and interest rates near historic highs, state bureaucracy employs a third of the beginning of the decade to 5 percent in divestment is good business. Over the entire white labor force. 1984! Suddenly, the idea that divestment past half decade international capital has The effects of this apartheid Keynes­ in South Africa might be a good thing, significantly shifted the way in which it ianism were predictable. Inflation took after all, began to be heard in corporate shares in the superexploitation of South off. So did borrowing from foreign boardrooms from Detroit to London. Africa's black toilers. banks. International debt jumped from Early this year Ford, then the largest car­ Smash Apartheid Capitalism $12 to $19 billion between 1981 and maker in S~uth Africa, sold 60 percent 1984. Half this money was owed by the of its operation to Anglo American. Through Workers Revolution! government and its panoply of state­ Coca-Cola, likewise, sold off a majority Even before the present black revolt controlled companies. The rand steadily interest, and International Harvester sold erupted last summer, the South Afri­ (kpreciated, which further fueled do­ its truck operation outright. The British­ can economy was in deep trouble: un­ lIlestic inflation. owned Barclays, the largest foreign bank employment, investment and profits The husiness community was not in South Africa, has reduced its hold- were stuck at depression levels; intlation 31 was accelerating, and international debt was building up rapidly. What turned this severe conjunctural crisis into a whole­ sale financial panic is, of course, the prospect of bloody civil war. Significantly the panic button was first pushed not by the multinationals and Wall Street banks but by South Af­ rica's own white moneyed classes. Re­ porting from Johannesburg early this year, the Wall Street Journal (5 February) wrote: "Many whites here, clinging to their privileges and luxuries, nevertheless ex­ ude apprehension about the future. A small furor was created a couple of weeks ago by the private pUQlication of a report entitled 'How You Can Get a Second Passport' -how, in other words, sanctuary can be arranged elsewhere if apartheid collapses." While not many whites have as yet been leaving South Africa for sanctuaries elsewhere, they have been sending their money to sanctuaries elsewhere. The outflow of South African-owned funds tripled between 1983 and 1984, from SL/SYL (above) $700 million to $2 billion. call for class struggle against Most of this white capital flight comes apartheid, not from middle- and upper-class English appeals to speakers rather than Afrikaners. It is not capitalists' simply that the English are more fearful "conscience. " abou't black revolt. They do not relish living in a garrison state under a die-hard Afrikaner regime which has learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the Great Trek of the 1830s. What is in­ volved is not just a clash of national cultures and historic enmities. A diehard ant for many U.S. firms. More starkly, of black toilers, weakening their capac­ Afrikaner government would likely turn a West German banker exclaimed, "I fear ity to struggle. the country into an economic laaRer, a bloodbath in which there will be no Wall Street is not only concerned restricting the import of luxuries and winners" (Wall Street Journal, 5 Septem­ about saving white-supremacy from it­ the export of capital. The Botha regime ber). If the apartheid state succeeds in self in South Africa. It hopes, as do its has already moved in this direction by restoring the social peace of the grave­ political representatives in city halls, imposing a two-tier foreign-exchange yard, as it did after Sharpeville, the Wall Congress and the White House, to ex­ system. Street loans and multinational invest­ ploit the "sanctions" and "divestment" As massive white capital flight ments will flow back. In the meantime ... issue to defuse the anger of a deeply drained their reserves, South African For decades liberals and reformists in alienated black population that sees all banks were forced to borrow abroad ever the West have demanded "Divest, divest, too clearly the parallels between racist larger amounts on ever shorter terms. Of divest!" in order to pressure the Afri­ terror in Soweto and in Harlem. Corpo­ South Africa's $19 billion in foreign kaner nationalist regime into reforming rate America wants to convince black bank debt, two-thirds falls due within a apartheid. Now, they have divestment­ people that they have a "friend in Chase year, almost half within six months. Such as much as they're ever going to get-for Manhattan." a lopsided debt structure is exceptional exactly the opposite reason. Foreign in­ But from Wall Street to the White even by Third World standards. vestors are convinced that the Botha re­ House, the main enemy is at home! And Normally, there would be no question gime will not make the concessions, every blow struck against that enemy about rolling over these South African even verbally, which they hope will by workers and their allies in this coun­ loans. But the situation in South Africa dampen black unrest. try is a real blow for black freedom in is anything but normal. The state of The flight of capital can only further South Africa. As communists, we seek emergency imposed in late July and depress the South African economy. As to unleash the power of the American Botha's hard line speech on August 15 revolutionaries, we do not believe in "the proletariat for socialist revolution. The finally convinced international capital worse, the better" in South Africa or tremendous wealth and technology of that South Africa was fast heading to­ elsewhere. Except in a period when the this country, which have served to crush ward a bloody abyss. "The speech was revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid the oppressed of Africa and the rest of so far removed from South African re­ system is immediately posed, isolation the world, must be placed in their service ality it breeds a sense of fear among busi­ from the world market is likely to result to build a socialist future free of want, nessmen," said a South African consult- in massive dislocation and deprivation exploitation and war..

"' "". ___'","1.' I I I II '"'''''"1, ••• ''''.' .. ''._".,11 •••• __••• _1_••• ,.11,.,.11 ••• 111111_ ~1I111I1~IIIIIUIIIIIIIIIIIIUIWlJLlJIIILL.\-L~1 _1_aj_L •.. _ •. __ .~ ______• __' ____ •• __... _. __ ••• ,-"" • 32 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 406, 20 June 1986

Massive Black Strike Under Apartheid Reign of Terror South Africa Showdown Minister Louis Le Grange martial law (COSATU) as well as those of the Forge a powers. In the early hours of the 12th, National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) security forces rounded up at least 1.200 were ransacked. Winnie Mandela, wife Bolshevik Party! anti-apartheid militants, including lead­ of imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Man­ ers of the United Democratic Front dela, was barred from speaking to jour­ JUNE 17-South Africa's black masses (UDF), the president of the Azanian nalists and restricted to her house from ohserved the tenth anniversary of the People's Organisation (AZAPO) Saths 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily. Reporters were Soweto rehe1\ion, which was bloodily Cooper, Piroshaw Camay of the Council completely barred from the black town­ repressed hy the apartheid state, with a of Unions of South Africa (CUSA). and ships and prohibited from reporting any general strike on June 16. The largest clergymen. During the next days, over "subversive" statements (such as a strike ever "stayaway," involving millions of 4,000 were "detained," including many call), any actions by the police or army, black workers and shutting down major lower and middle-level officials of black or the names of detainees. On the 16th urhan centers, was carried out in defi­ unions and anti-apartheid groups, as well telephones were cut off for most of the ance of the regime's banning of any and as the secretary general of the South day in the townships around Johannes­ all Soweto commemorations and under African Catholic Bishops Conference burg. Cape Town, Pretoria. Port Eliza­ draconian nationwide "state of emer­ and members of the End Conscription beth and Durban. gency" conditions. As we go to press, Campaign, a white group that opposes Pretoria geared up for repression on the near-total blackout of information the draft. a massive. hloody scale. In an interview from South Africa leaves only scraps of Under the regulations, detainees may on ABC News, T. J. Swanepoel, the information gleaned from dispatches be held incommunicado indefinitely, pol ice commander who orllned the first self-censored by the media to conform and no security official can be tried for shot fired in the massacre of over 1,000 to apartheid haas PW. Botha's "emer­ any actions under the "emergency," black youth during the 1976 Soweto gency" restrictions. In Paris, African including murder. The offices of the rebellion, said he would do it again: National Congress (ANC) leader Oliver Congress of South African Trade Unions "I will kill a thousand people if I can Tambo said that, contrary to official reports of "only" eleven killed on Mon­ day, there were "unconfirmed reports of massive slaughter." Film footage that has gotten through shows the streets of Johannesburg virtu­ ally deserted, as were the trains and huses that normally bring hundreds of thousands from Soweto to work in the factories, shops and offices. Reportedly the strike was completely effective in the Eastern Cape region, including blacks, coloureds (mixed-race) and In­ dians. One business source reported that up to 90 percent of the nation's hlack workers participated in the strike. In Durban, 40 percent of the workers reportedly stayed away today as well. However, mass demonstrations and the insurrectionary actions Botha claimed were being prepared by "radical and revolutionary elements" apparently did not materialize. In the June 16 test of strength between the Pretoria regime and the combative hlack masses, it appears that there has been a cold standoff, for now. Botha declared the "state of emer­ gency" June 12 after the bogus "parlia­ Reuters ments" of coloured and Indian represen­ Apartheid terror rumbles through Crossroads as black settlement burns, tatives balked at giving Law and Order leaving more than 70,000 homeless.

, '" 33

~top the violence .... " On June IS, police fired tear gas into a gathering of nearly 1,000 commemorating Soweto at the St. Athans Road Moslem Mosque in Athlone, a mixed-race suburb of Cape Town. According to the UPI: "Terrified worshippers broke doors and windows attempting to escape and several older people and children fainted and had to be dragged from the building, witnesses said. Police waiting outside the mosque beat fleeing worshippers with whips." At St. Nicholas Anglican Church in the Cape township of Elsie's River, 250 were arrested (including many children) by police who called the service a "sub­ Doing Botha's work: versive" meeting. black vigilantes Despite Botha's reign of terror, the torch shanties in massive strik'"Q'vas carried off. In the Crossroads 20-month-Iong confrontation between settlement. the racist regime and deepening anti­ apartheid revolt, police-state measures have failed to cow the oppressed into submission. Importantly, repression could not prevent the two previous general strikes, in the Transvaal in November 1984 and nationally in the recent heroic May Day strike. But as and industrial conglomerate (New York led his Aji'ikallCl" ~ti'('/".\tilIlJ\hl'll·(·gillg the prospect for bloody one-sided civil Times Magazine, IS June). And the black (AWB-Afrikaner Resistanl'l' Mm'l'· war looms ever larger, the question of unions have discovered that they can't ment) thugs in storming a Natiotlall'artv power-who shall rule the country-is avoid politics. It all points to a revolu­ meeting just days after the b()lllhing ()i posed starkly. In confrontations such as tionary crisis brewing, but the key cle­ the black states. From the shouldCls oi this, the need for revolutionary leader­ ment for victory is missing. Unless the his storm troopers, as the ;\ W B \ thrl'I,'· ship is more urgent than ever. anti-apartheid revolt is organized along legged swastika flags iiiit'd the hall. South Africa today has the smell of class lines, with the black proletariat led Terre'Blanche ranted: "I wanl to tell thl' a revol utionary situation. In Lenin's by a multiracial Bolshevik party, forged ANC: if you mess with thL' B()cr Yo!k classic definition, it's not enough that on the program of permanent revolution (people), we will blow you all to 111'11"" the masses can no longer live in the old and leading the rest of the oppressed (Times [London!. 23 May\. way-their rulers must also be unable and disenfranchised in a fight for state At the Crossroads squatll'l sl'ltknll:l1t.s to rule in the old way. The government's power, the possibility of smashing the near Cape Town, the regil1w is .l'ivill,l' a actions are losing coherence, going in power of the white-supremacist capi­ taste of what it is prepared to 111111;lsl1 different directions at the same time, talist regime will be squandered, with on the black population, For YL'ars ('ross trying for piecemeal "reform" of apart­ hideous consequences. roads has stood as a ..,ymbol of resistance heid, ordering brutal repression of anti­ to the apartheid "influx control" which apartheid revolt, fantasizing about a White Laager Digs In makes it illegal for the majority 01 blacks separate Afrikaner state. Meanwhile the While the nationalists of the main to move to the cities, Thl' F()Vl'l'nnll'nt open fascists are growing in strength. anti-apartheid grouping, the ANC, pur­ has unsuccessfully heen trying t() i'llICC There appears to be a loss of nerve at sue a strategy of "pressure" on the out most of the Crossroads populati()n the top, the inability of the state to act regime (from without through imperial­ into a new black "township" tell miics as the general staff of a united ruling ist economic sanctions, from within further out of town" "a deathtrap with class. Which doesn't mean they're not through the "policy of chaos," of making only one access road and military ha'l's ready for blood-on the contrary, geno­ the townships "ungovernable"), Botha on two sides. As they have throughout cide can be the result. Hitler came to has increasingly responded to pressure the country, the cops spawiled real,ti()n· power in part because of a loss of nerve from the right. Thus the South African ary black vigilantes in Crossroads, called of the German bourgeoisie. But rather bombing raids on the capitals of three "witdoi'kies" for the white arm hand, than uniting around a bonaparte, the black African border states, ostensibly they wear, consisting primarily of hlack South African rulers seem to be thrash­ aimed at ANC installations, in late May. cops, common criminal, and SOill(' ,hop ing around in wild factionalism. Said Botha afterward: "South Africa has owners, to be used against the militant The enormous potential power of the the capacity and the will to break the township youth, the "comrades." six-million-strong South African black ANC. ... We have only delivered the first Between mid-May and mid·June, the proletariat has once again been demon­ installment" (New York Times, 22 May). police and army have hacked up sevnal strated. "A general strike could bring A genuinely fascist far right has thousand vigilantes in systematically the country to its knees in a couple of grown, largely at the expense of Botha's destroying sections of Cros.,road.' occu­ weeks," worried the chief labor special­ National Party (especially among the pied by the "comrades," killint'- at least ist for the huge Anglo American mining police). Hitlerite Eugene Terre' Blanche 65 with machetes and gllns, torching 34 thousands of shacks and leaving 70,000 homeless in Cape Town's winter rain and near-freezing temperatures. Pretoria's game here is clear, of portraying the events at Crossroads as "black on black violence." And Ronald Reagan joins in this pretext for terror, claiming. "It is blacks fighting against blacks" (New York 7i'mes. 14 June). As has been evi­ dent since the outset of the anti-apartheid revolt. Washington stands with its anti­ Soviet ally in Pretoria. charged with po­ licing the continent for the "free world." This simple fact has not dissuaded the proponents of imperialist "sanctions"­ Black unionists who run the gamut from Bishop Des­ cheer founding mond Tutu to the ANC and its "left" of COSATU, supporters. Newsweek (23 June) reported November 1985. that "Tutu met with Botha for 90 minutes and appealed to him-in the name of Christianity and anticommunism-to lift the ban." Tutu emerged from the meeting with the complaint that the draconian measures would "not likely help restore law and order," i.e., they might backfire. And in an Op Ed piece in the New York 7i'mes (16 June) he spelled out the anti­ his headquarters in Zambia. ANC presi­ scaled off to whites. The flowers \\ere Soviet "logic" of his call for sanctions, dent Tambo called for a total shutdown seiLed by the apartheid authorities; noting that the U.S. used sanctions as part of a "death-defying" campaign apparently they too were ·'subversive." against Poland, Nicaragua and Libya and to "bring the ruling class to its knees." Later. some were dropped into the town­ still maintains a blockade of Cuba. But But the ANC calls for "armed struggle" ship by plane. Attached to one bouquet the ultimate absurdity and imperialist and "people's war" as part of its was a messa~e that read: hypocrisy behind the call on racist mass thoroughly reformist strategy of pressur­ "Many wl~itc South African, fccl a pro­ murderers like the United States rulers ing apartheid into a "power-sharing" found 'L'n_'L' of _,adnc's and ,hame at what happcncd in Sowcto in 1'J76. and to impose sanctions on their South scheme. Are unarmed black masses to African junior partners was exposed by what continuc:, to happcn in 1l)~6, and go up against the massively armed racist would like to express this in sOllle way. the report that Israel, a major military ruling class and die by the thousands Normal avenucs of conlll1unication have supplier of the Pretoria regime. was con­ just so that Oliver Tambo can be South hccn clo,,'') and 'I) Wl' search for a ges­ sidering a trade ban! Africa's counterpart to Robert Mugabe ture to show hlac" South Africans that Similarly, the Commonwealth Emi­ we carl', and that wc too would likc to of Zimbabwe, so Nelson Mandela's pic­ sec the creation of a just and opcn society nent Persons Group supports sanctions ture will be printed on Rand notes while in this countrv." and pressure on Pretoria to negotiate Anglo American, Wall Street and the -- --!vo,- 'Yod lillies. 17 Junc with the ANC in order to forestall the City of London continue to control the Such ~estures arc all too rare in this coming to power of a "radical black gov­ wealth of South Africa'! To liberate racist pZlliee Slate. But a Bolshevik ernment 'totally antipathetic' to Western the oppressed masses from apartheid party can sei/c upon such openings interests" (New York Times, 13 June). slavery those who lahor fIlllsf rll/e. This while struggling tirelessly to overcome Botha's reply to "the Commonwealth" can be accomplished only through the ethnic and t ri bal ist d i visions among the was the bombing raid on three black construction of a Leninist proletarian exploited and oppressed. especially African member states while the EPG vanguard forged in struggle against among the strategic "migrant" workers was in South Africa. American leftists, petty-bourgeois nationalism and its pres­ who come from the bantustans and meanwhile, are calling on the U.S. to sure schemes. neighboring black statl'S. The vision of "Boycott South Africa, Not Nicaragua." Pretoria, spurred on by the Afrikaner a ".iust and open society" for all the But KKK-endorsed Reagan, who alibied ultraright, is gearing up to drown the oppressed--· in which anti-racist whites the March 1985 Uitenhage massacre and black revolt in blood. But there are not­ must have a place as well---can only told the world that racial segregation had able cracks within the white population. be realiLed in a black-centered workers been abolished in South Africa, is in a as demonstrated by thousand of white government that turns the tremendous strategic alliance with apartheid (even if youth who are refusing conscription and mineral and industrial resources of South an occasionally strained one) whereas the hundreds who defy police .Ijamhoks Africa into a powerhouse for the libera­ it is committed to overthrowin/? Nicara­ and bullets to demonstrate alongside tion of the entire continent. The ques­ gua's Sandinista regime. blacks. One of the stories to filter out of tion of power is posed pointblank--­ and be~innin~ the work of constructing Smash Apartheidl South Africa is that in the early morning hours of June 16, some 30 carloads of a Leni~ist-TI~lskyist party for the con­ Workers to Power I flowers collected the day before in lib­ quest of power, the urgent international­ Backing the Soweto Day general eral white churches were deposited on ist duty of all revolutionists, is long strike in a May 21 radio broadcast from the outskirts of Soweto-which was overdue .• 35 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 486, 29 September 1989 Black Workers Strike Against "Divestment" Union-Busting Strikes of black South African work­ was not primarily the result of pressure sure of other capitalist powers, espe­ ers against the hellish conditions of from divestment activists. On the con­ cially the "democratic" United States. apartheid rule increased dramatically in trary-divestment is simply good busi­ It's obscene to imagine that racist Amer­ 1989, vividly demonstrating the social ness for corporations, though not for ican imperialism-which put its own and economic power of organized black black workers who have to live with the citizens in concentration camps while labor. But two key strikes this year have results. A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focused world attention on workers' With the apartheid state's economy in which carpetbombed Indochina, and opposition to divestment. In May, work­ its worst shape since 1985, foreign props up every "moderately authoritar­ ers at nine Mobil Oil installations struck investors do not want to touch South ian" butcher dictator on earth-can be against the company's plan to "divest" Africa. Although sanctions and divest­ pressured into pressuring their South by selling out to Gencor, a South Afri­ ment have had limited overall impact on African allies to dismantle apartheid. can mining conglomerate notorious for the economy, the cutoff of foreign loans The continued flight of capital can union-busting. The Chemical Workers from banks worried about the future of only further depress the South African Industrial Union called the action to the white-supremacist regime is draining economy. Except in a period when the protest Mobil's refusal to negotiate the up to $2 billion annually in repayments revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid terms of the sale, but later agreed to call from an economy stretched to the limit. system is immediately posed, isolation off the strike in return for a cash settle­ So with profits very low, and interest from the world market is likely to re­ ment of one month's pay (about 2,000 rates up to 20 percent, U.S. and other sult in massive dislocation and depriva­ rand) per worker. foreign capitalists can sell their assets for tion of black workers, weakening their In July, 1,200 workers at Goodyear interest-hearing notes and make a killing ability to struggle. The wealth of South Rubber, represented by the National while divesting. Africa must go not to the capitalists­ Union of Metalworkers, struck over the Thus the primary demands of the ref­ American, European or Afrikaner-but company's sale to the South African ormist anti-apartheid movement have to the workers who created it. The only company Conso!. The strike demands of been fulfilled, as much as they can be, kind of "divestment" that will benefit separation pay of 5,000 rand per worker, yet apartheid remains intact, while black the exploited and oppressed will be guaranteed conditions of employment, unions are forced to try to negotiate the proletarian revolution, and the expro­ maintenance of existing labor agree­ terms of divestment. The assumption priation of these riches by a black­ ments, payout of pension benefits, and of the divestment/sanctions movement, centered workers government as part of writing off housing loans, reflect wide­ which includes such so-called "social­ a socialist federation of southern Africa. spread anger over divestment's victimi­ ists" as the Communist Party USA, the Here in the U.S., real solidarity with zation of the black working class. Socialist Workers Party and the Interna­ the courageous black masses of South Goodyear's response, on August 8, tional Socialist Organization, really is Africa means a revolutionary fight to was to fire all the strikers, and go ahead that South African capitalism can be fun­ bring down the most rapacious imperial­ with the divestment deal. damentally reformed through the pres- ism of all.. For years, liberal and reformist anti­ apartheid activists, taking their lead from the ANC, have held as an article of faith that to be against apartheid means to be for divestment and economic sanctions. In 1985-86 big student protests swept U.S. campuses, demanding that univer­ sity administrations sell off their finan­ NYC demo cial holdings in corporations operating against in South Africa. The Spartacist League South Africa alone stood up and told the truth: divest­ executions, ment is at hes! an empty moral gesture, June 1983: Spartacists and if foreign companies did withdraw call for productive assets from South Africa this class struggle would hurt black workers and weaken to overthrow the black union movement. apartheid Four years ago, it was cheap to advo­ capitalism, cate divestment, since there hadn't been not liberal any. But since then, 136 companies­ "divestment" half of all the U.S. firms with direct schemes. investments in South Africa-have sold out to South African businessmen. This

1111 """.,.,.,•• " •••______'_.III ••• IIIHIIII_ IIIIIIUIIi 36

reprinted ji"01n Workers yP-.!l.~uard No. 496, 23 Fehruary 1990

, I j' uulers Black masses of Soweto (right) throng to celebrate ANC leader Nelson Mandela's release after 27 years in apartheid prisons. AP rMand,ela Relea.sed-,Black South· Africa Jubilant, Defiant , 1 • ~ ~ Smash Apartheid- Black Workers Must Take Power! As Nelson Mandela walked out of South Africa. But this "unity fest" of im­ with hammer and sickle draped the bal­ prison Sunday, February II, tens of thou­ poverished blacks in the townships with cony from which Mandela spoke. "I am sands filled the streets and stadiums from their oppressors and exploiters cannot a loyal and disciplined member of the Cape Town to Soweto in defiant jubila­ and will not last. ANC," he said, reaffirming his support tion. For black Africans, coloureds As the cameras focused on Mandela to armed struggle and saluting the South (mixed-race) and Indians, Mandela has walking out of Victor Verster prison, TV African Communist Party (SACP). become the embodiment of implacable broadcasts carried the voice of South Af­ The morning after, there was conster­ opposition to white racist rule. After 27 rican president F. W. De Klerk declaring, nation in corporate boardrooms when years of demanding "Free Mandela!" as "The season of violence is over." Mean­ Mandela reaffirmed the ANC's call for they sought to break the chains of apart­ while. troops in full combat gear with nationalization of the mines. The Johan­ heid slavery, many see his freedom as automatic rifles were moving into the nesburg gold market sank to the floor. heralding their own. There were also center of Cape Town where tens of thou­ Maggie Thatcher railed about Mandela's many white South Africans in the crowds sands had gathered to welcome the anti­ unrepentant words. The New York Times who don't want to live in a racist gar­ apartheid fighter. Earlier, police shot into (15 February) complained that "Mr. rison state and see in Mandela a black the fringes of the crowd, killing one man Mandela" hadn't "reached out to other leader who can overcome South Africa's and injuring over 100. After one volley, political currents," but instead supported deep racial divide. more than 25 people lay in the street. armed struggle and praised the "com­ At the same time, racist rulers from The imperialists' hopes in Mandela as rades" of the SACP. One Jo'burg disc qf Klerk in Pretoria to Thatcher in Lon­ "Mr. Peaceful Transition" were fading jockey told listeners that Mandela's don and Bush in Washington also even as he began to speak. "The scene speech "could have been written for him "greeted" Mandela. They are looking to at the town hall was revolutionary," re­ by Karl Marx." the black leader to be a "facilitator" for ported the London Independent (12 Fe­ This is not true. The African National a "negotiated settlement" which, while bruary). The green, yellow and black Congress has from its inception advo­ eliminating the hated apartheid struc­ flag of the African National Congress cated a "mixed economy" and some tures, would preserve capitalist rule in fluttered from the flagpole. A red flag form of "power sharing" with the white-

I ~ 37 supremacist regime. Its sporadic recourse to guerrilla war has been as a pressure tactic to force negotiations. Thus Man­ dela reaffirmed the ANC's longstanding appeals to Anglo-American imperialism, by calling for continued economic sanc­ tions against South Africa. And the Communist Party, whose hammers and sickles make the apartheid rulers see red, is decidedly not fighting for commu­ nism, but for a "democratic" capitalist "post-apartheid state." Yet the harsh re­ alities of life in South Africa are such that there's no room to play "Let's Make a Deal." In his Cape Town speech, Mandela declared: "Now is the time to intensify the struggle on all fronts." If the purpose Black workers must bury apartheid! Striking South African rail workers, of this call was to increase pressure for November 1989. negotiations, the effect of an upsurge of black struggle may go far beyond what 31 percent of the vote in the "whites dian masses. can offer to South African the ANC wants. The Nationalist Party's only" September 1989 elections. On Fe­ whites the chance to collaborate in the gamble has created an opening, and al­ bruary 15, some 15,000 turned out for development, rather than the looting, of ready it is being seized. From the Ciskei, a right-wing protest against the govern­ what is their homeland too. where bantustan police shot tear gas at ment's release of Mandela. The para­ Lenin defined as one of the hallmarks protesters, to Johannesburg, where 1,000 military fascist Afrikaner Resistance of a prerevolutionary situation that those black postal workers did the fast-step­ Movement hoisted their three-legged at the top are unable to rule in the old ping (oyi-toyi march through the streets, swastika-like symbol. The military is way. Clearly this is the case with the the smell of rebellion is in the air. still smarting over their stinging defeat Nationalists, whose iron grip on power in Angola by Cuban forces at Cuito since 1l)4X is palpably beginning to De Klerk's Gamble Cuanavale a year and a half ago. The come unhinged. Dr. Gen'it Viljoen, the cops have been shaken by exposures cabinet minister regarded as the brain­ The Nationalist Party under the new of police death squads assassinating truster of De Klerk's "reforms," said "verliJ?te" (enlightened) leadership of De activists. Klerk has adopted the "rationalist im­ Mandela, on the other hand, is faced perialist" viewpoint espoused by the with the fact that blacks expect funda­ likes of Anglo American Corporation mental change. He had to speak to this mining mogul Gavin Reily. The econ­ in his first speech after arriving in omy has taken a battering as many mul­ Soweto: tinationals pull out of direct operations (while keeping licensing agreements). "We believe that apartheid has created a heinous system of exploitation in which This is partly due to sanctions, but also a racist minority monopolizes economic to the unrest and repression, and the lure weaIth while the vast majority of the op­ of superprofits from restoring capitalist pressed and black people are condemned exploitation in East Europe. Meanwhile, to poverty. "South Africa is a wealthy country. It is many educated middle-class whites are the labor of black workers that has built emigrating to more respectable racist ha­ the cities, roads and factories we see. vens like Australia. They cannot be excluded from sharing De Klerk & Co. would like to present this weaIth." a fa~ade of democracy while leaving in­ Yet long before the Nationalists intro­ tact the existing economic structure. duced their elaborate "separate develop­ They figure that only Nelson Mandela ment" (apartheid) schemes, South Afri­ would have the authority to pull this off. can capitalism rested (as it does today) Mandela took pains in Cape Town to say upon the superexploitation of black la­ he hasn't bargained away the struggle bor. Without starvation wages for the for freedom, and it's far from clear that masses, no superprofits for the white the maximal changes the Nationalist Par­ masters who lord it over 20 million ty is willing to make would meet the blacks. most minimal demands of the ANC. So The chasm between white and black far De Klerk hasn't agreed to lift the in South Africa cann~t be bridged by state of emergency or release all political bourgeois democracy, which would in­ prisoners, much less do away with the tensify the enormous social contradic­ Group Areas Act or accept a parliament tions to the point of explosion. Democ­ based on "one man, one vote." racy for the oppressed majority can only No "negotiated settlement" can stop The Nationalists risk alienating their come about through workers revolution. this. Anti-apartheid protesters bru­ own base. Diehard Afrikaner right­ And a black-led workers government, in­ tally suppressed in Bloemfontein, wingers in the Conservative Party won corporating as well the coloured and In- 30 January 1990. 38 early this month that the Nationalist Citing an article by Eddie Koch in the tal reality of apartheid, and no "negotia­ Party would surrender power within ten Weekly Mail (13 January 1989), South tions" can change that. years. Now he is already predicting the African Marxist intellectual Baruch Hir­ But militant class struggle can, as the end will come in five. son graphically describes this hell: recent strike of black railway workers Lenin's second criterion was that "Over half a million black workers in against the South African Transport those at the bottom refuse to be ruled in these compounds have always been Services (SATS) demonstrated. When the old way-something South African closely guarded and closed to outsiders, the workers walked out in November, blacks have demonstrated time and but new measures seal them off even SATS immediately fired the 23,000 strik­ again. The missing and key component more tightly. According to Koch, the ers. For the next three months it was is the revolutionary party which can take hostels are surrounded by high walls and hard class war. All told, 27 people died advantage of the evident disarray of the rolls of razor wire; the areas are patrolled in one of the bloodiest labor battles in ruling class to mobilize the working by mounted security men, armoured ve­ the recent history of the black trade­ class for the conquest of power. The hicles and dog squads, and in some union movement. Then, on January 9, a forging of such an integrated, multi­ mines white miners are active members train carrying hundreds of strikers to a racial Bolshevik party, acting as the of the security force" (SearchliMht South union meeting at Germiston station was vanguard of the workers and tribune of Africa, July 1989). This is life under the met by 1,000 vigilantes armed with pan­ the oppressed-this is the urgent task at so-called "progressive" capitalists-like Mas (machetes), knives, short spears and hand. Gavin Reily, head of Anglo American, stones. who has taken the lead in "negotiating" Despite the bloody mob assault, which Smash the Chains of with the ANC. was organized by the bosses and the po­ Apartheid Slavery! The gulf between black and white lice, the black South African Railway Nowhere in the world are the differ­ wages in South Africa is vast: in 1984 Workers Union (SARWU) held on and ences between white and black as vast the average black miner made about finally beat the attack. Their courage at as they are in South Africa today. In the $200 a month, about one-sixth the aver­ Germiston sparked a solidarity strike aftermath of the 1984-86 black rebellion, age for white miners. In manufacturing, from black telecommunications workers the government has repealed not only a white workers make about four times as and an international campaign of labor number of "petty apartheid" laws, such much as blacks. Moreover, millions of solidarity. The government was worried as segregation of public accommoda­ black workers have been made foreign­ about the impact of more killings of tions, but also the hated pass laws and ers in their own country, forced to travel strikers on its plans to free Mandela. In "influx control" legislation used to drive for hours every day from far-off bantus­ the end, the wage cut was canceled and blacks from the cities to barren town­ tans where the apartheid state dumped the firings were rescinded, as were evic­ ships. But the vast black majority is still them when it created these phony "in­ tions from workers' hostels. disenfranchised, forcibly segregated and dependent homelands." While many As black people in South Africa see subject to police-state rule, whether South African whites lounge by their Nelson Mandela's release as a harbinger through the "state of emergency," "ban­ swimming pools, black children play in of liberation, there will be an acute crisis ning" laws, bantustans or the militarized the mud along unpaved roads, drinking of expectations. Speaking on ABC-TV's labor compounds where contract labor­ contaminated water from open sewers. NiMhtline (7 February), Winnie Mandela ers in the mines are housed under lock A black child dies of hunger in South said that "for the ordinary man in the and key. Africa every 20 minutes. This is the bru- street, his liberation is tantamount to

Subscribe! Workers Vanguard o $7 for 24 Issues Marxist Working·Class Biweekly o $2 for 10 of the Spartaclst League (includes introductory issues English·language Spartacist) o International rates: $25 airmail/$7 seamail

Women and Revolution o $3 for 3 issues Journal of the Women's Commission o International rates: of the Spartacist League $6 airmail/$4 seamail

Spartacist (edlcl6n en espanol) o $2 for 4 issues Organo de marxismo revolucionarlo o International rates: $4 airmail/$2 seamall Name ______

Address ______

Apt. # ______Phone ( _ ) _____

City ---____ State --- Zip -----;;-8""H8

Make checks payable/mall to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO. New York, NY 10116 39 freedom for the oppressed masses of this country." An article in the Johannesburg Weekly Mail (25 January) notes: "The 'Young Lions,' the radical township youth, are showing deep suspicion of the process of negotiations." It went on: "The generation which grew up in the townships during the uprisings of 19R4- 1986 was one nurtured on militancy and radical solutions. "Slogans like 'Freedom or death!' 'Vic­ tory is certain' or 'Long live the spirit of no compromise' ... served to rally Black masses the masses and to express the revolu­ want revolution, tionary sentiment sweeping through the townships." not "power­ sharing" with The article quotes ANC leader Walter "enlightened" Sisulu saying, "The problem is many of capitalists. the youngsters are not really interested Jubilation over in the negotiations. In fact they've be­ Mandela's release come a little bit angry. That's why I say presages an that this chap De Klerk is moving too acute crisis of fast .... We want to educate our people." expectations. For this they will rely on the Stalinists like SACP leader Joe Siovo. who says "socialism is not on the immediate agen­ da." But hundreds of thousands of mili­ African Communist Party, which is not twist and turn and now following his tant black workers in the mines and mills fighting for communism but for a capi­ new mentor Gorbachev, SACP leader are demanding the full fruits of their talist "post-apartheid state." For more Slovo has consistently opposed socialist backbreaking labor. If that is commu­ than six decades, the Stalinists have had revolution. Yet South Africa today is the nism, they're for it-and the Stalinists a "two-stage" program: bourgeois de­ most dramatic proof of the correctness in their terminal crisis will have no easy mocracy now, socialist revolution later, of Trotsky's theory of permanent revo­ time "re-educating" them otherwise. i.e., never. When this revisionist pro­ lution, which was also the program of South African blacks haven't heard of gram was first presented by Stalin and the early Communist International, that the "Death of Communism." Bukharin in the late '20s, some South in the age of imperialism even the most African Communists objected, such as basic democratic tasks can only be ac­ Black and Red in South Africa S.P. Bunting, who at the Sixth Congress complished by the victory of proletarian of the Communist International in 1928 revolution. To do away with apartheid rule re­ argued: There must be a fight to forge an quires nothing short of thoroughgoing "Native workers and some peasants are integrated multiracial Bolshevik party. socialist revolution. And the millions­ pouring into the Party in preference to An internationalist party, it will open strong black South African proletariat joining the purely native bodies, whether its doors to the hundreds of thousands national or industrial, which have let has the power. One of the biggest of migrant workers-from Zimbabwe, changes over the last decade has been them down and fallen into the hands of the bourgeoisie. They fully appreciate Mozambique, Botswana, Namibia­ the growth of the black union movement, the 'vulgar Marxist' slogan of 'Workers who pour into South Africa. And a which by virtue of its concentrated social of the World Unite,' of joint action by South African workers state will become strength emerged as a central force in black and white labour against the com­ the motor force for liberation of the the anti-apartheid struggle. But the black mon enemy: and at the same time they see that the CP sincerely and unreserv­ subcontinent. • unions, at first a conglomeration of edly espollse their national calise as an syndicalist- and nationalist-led organiza­ oppressed race." tions, have been drawn under the aegis -Searchlight SOlltli Afrim, of the ANC. July 19R9 Spartacist League Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of the While the Stalinists have consistently Public Offices Congress of South African Trade Unions pushed their "two-stage" line, under (COSATU), was at Mandela's side in Gorbachev's "new thinking" this has - MARXIST LlTERATURE­ Cape Town and is now a major contender been intensified as the Soviet leader Bay Area for succession to ANC leadership, after looks for a global deal with the imperi­ Thurs .. 530·800 p.m., Sat.: 100-5:00 p.m. the older generation of Sisulu, Tambo alists. The Kremlin has put the financial 1634 Telegraph. 3rd Floor (near 17th Street) and Mandela retire. Already more than screws to the ANC to begin "negotia­ Oakland. California Phone (510) 839-0851 once Ramaphosa has sent striking miners tions" with the apartheid butchers. Chicago back to work defeated after reluctantly Speaking in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1987, Tues.: 5:00-9·00 p.m .. Sat.: 11 :00 a.m.-2:00 p.m. going on strike against the Anglo Amer­ Victor Goncharov, the deputy director of 161 W. Harrison St. 10th Floor Chicago. IllinOIS Phone. (312) 663-0715 ican bosses whom the ANC, despite all the Institute of African Studies of the their talk of nationalization, look to as USSR Acadcmy of Sciences, said that New York City future partners in a "democratic" South socialism would come "maybe not in Tues.: 6:30·9:00 p.m .. Sat.: 1 :00-5:00 p.m. 41 Warren St. (one block below Africa. 25 years but in a ccntury 00. I am an Chambers St. near Church St.) The fight for workers power means a optimist." New York. NY Phone: (212) 267-1025 break with the ANC and with the South Both when he followed Stalin's every

----~"'" '''' ,,,,"',,·,,··,,,,,·------______...... I1I1WI1111'·...,./" """~''"''I~III 40 reprinted/rom Workers Vanguard No. 504,15 June 1990 South African CP Leader Joe Siovo: From "Uncle Joe" Stalin to Gorby Joe Siovo, general chairman of the (mixed-race). At his 1964 trial under the with us, not with Socialism." Siovo em­ South African Communist Party, re­ Suppression of Communism Act, Nelson braces "the processes of perestroika and turned home in April from decades of Mandela pointed out: glasnost" as socialism's only hope of exile. During those years his wife and "For many decades communists were "showinf? its essentially [!J human/ace." comrade, Ruth First, was murdered in the only political group in South Africa But unlike Gorbachev he still holds "the 1982 in Mozambique by a letter bomb who were prepared to treat Africans as class struggle is the motor of human his­ human beings and their equals .... Be­ sent by a South African assassination cause of this. there are many Africans tory," and criticizes the CPs' "unilateral squad. A week after his return, Siovo who, today, tend to equate freedom with ideological disarmament" in the face of accompanied African National Congress communism. " the capitalist ideologues' offensive. leader Nelson Mandela, himself just re­ -quoted in Mary Benson, The appeal is to those CPers who don't leased after 27 years in apartheid pris­ Nelson Mandela: The Man just want to throw in the towel. But to and the Movement (1986) ons, at the first-ever ANC negotiations justify all the years when he followed with the white-supremacist Pretoria gov­ The black African masses also equate "Uncle Joe" Stalin's every twist and turn, ernment in May. Now Slovo's pamphlet, communism with a thoroughgoing social Siovo pens some patently self-serving Has Socialism Failed?, has become a revolution, with ripping South Africa's "self-criticism," like it is "now becom­ hot item, a topic of discussion in meet­ wealth out of the hands of the Randlords ing clear that the virtual destruction of ings of disintegrating Communist parties who have so cruelly superexploited them the command personnel of the Red from Chicago to Toronto and London. for over a century. Army, the lack of effective preparation Amid the terminal crisis of Stalinism, But they will not find the road to against Hitler's onslaught and Stalin's CPers are clinging to Slovo's pamphlet liberation in Joe Slovo's pamphlet, or in dictatorial and damaging interventions as a drowning man grasps at straws. As the party which for decades has sought in the conduct of the war could have leaders of collapsing East European "power sharing" with the "enlight­ cost the Soviet Union its victory." Now regimes seek refuge in the Second In­ ened" slavemasters like Anglo American becominf? clear?! In a similar vein, Siovo ternational, here is a party leader who in a "post-apartheid" (capitalist) South writes that "we kept silent for too long still calls himself a Communist. And Africa. after the 1956 Khrushchev revelations." unlike Brezhnev-era dinosaurs like the In Has Socialism Failed? Siovo glibly Baruch Hirson bitterly commented CPU SA's Gus Hall, Siovo is a Gor­ remarks, "Socialism certainly produced last year on the SACP leader's belated bachev man all the way. Moreover, a Stalin and a Ceausescu, but it also pro­ discovery of Stalinism. "Slovo had heard while Communist parties from Europe duced a Lenin and a Gorbachev." Oh these accounts of Stalin's crimes over to North America are in the throes of well, the reader is to conclude, two out many de~ades: was he deaf, or did he demoralization and outright liquida­ of four-not all bad. And his tract ad­ lack a sense of morality? He heard them tion, the SACP is at the height of its mits, rightly enough, "The Fault Lies from Trotskyists in Johannesburg in popularity. That the SACP's stock has gone up has nothing to do with any change in its program, which remains as wretchedly reformist as ever, at most calling for bourgeois democracy. In an interview with the London Independent (4 Novem­ ber 1988), cited by the South African Marxist intellectual Baruch Hirson, Siovo declares: "We are engaged in a struggle in which socialism is not on the immediate agenda or should be a criteria of participation in the struggle. For some while after apartheid falls there will be Joe Siovo (left), a mixed economy .... There is no pole­ returning after vault into socialism." decades of exile, In the context of the apartheid police with Nelson state, even white liberals found in the Mandela at Communist Party the only organized ve­ political rally In ..... '."'.' 11K South Africa. 'hicle to struggle against racism and for' .J basic democratic rights. It was the only sizable racially integrated party in South Africa, including not only blacks and whites but also Indians and coloureds 41

1943, he knew them when he read about the condemnation and rehabilitation of the Jewish doctors in the USSR ... " ("Thieves in the Thieves' Kitchen," Searchlight South Afi"ica, July 1989). More than avoiding a painful re­ examination of history, Siovo seeks to avoid renouncing Stalinism's re.t(lI"mist perversion of Leninism or analyzing its social roots. Thus Stalinism is defined as a "bureaucratic-authoritarian style of leadership," and "socialism without democracy." If Stalinism is simply over­ bearing centralism, therefore one does not have to analyze the material bases for the rise of a conservative, nationalist bureaucracy in the USSR, and the program it generated: "socialism in one country" for Russia and "two­ stage revolution"-i.e., no socialism­ For South Africa's oppressed black masses, the red flag of communism Is a elsewhere. symbol of the fight for freedom and social equality. Siovo mouths platitudes about "work­ ing class internationalism" being "one For Joe Siovo, that was then, and this is selves negotiating a "post-apartheid of the most liherating concepts in Marx­ now. state" with De Klerk, Coetzee and the ism" which "needs to find effective ex­ Certainly it would be unfair to accuse rest of the capitalist ruling c1a;;s. So pression in the new world c(JI1ditiol1s." him of such "preoccupations" as he while Anglo American publishes ads This rings pretty hollow in the face of hobnobs with the top exploiter~ of showing black miners as "shareholders," Moscow's world-historic betrayal of South Africa. We can't see Siovo chat­ the SACP chairman talks of "reorganis­ East Germany to a Fourth Reich, as well ting with Prime Minister De Klerk and ing social life" so that "the produc­ as its abandonment of Afghanistan, "Law and Order" Minister Coetzee about ers ... have a real say not only in the pro­ Nicaragua and Angola, to say nothing of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In­ duction of social wealth but also in its Kremlin arm-twisting to get the ANC to deed, Siovo writes: "On re/lec/ion, tlie disposal," and assures Jo'burg corporate come out foursquare for a "political set­ choice of" the word 'dictatorship' to de­ executives he does not foresee "the pre­ tlement" with the apartheid state. Where scrihe this type oj"socictv ccrtainly opcns mature abandonment of any role for mar­ was "working class internationalism" the way to amhiguitics and distortions." ket forces," etc. But while Siovo talks when Soviet deputy foreign minister Like bourgeois ideologues, he equates of "real democracy in the post-apartheid Anatoly Adamishin flew over the Wit­ the Marxist term for the rule of the state," the young comrades in the town­ watersrand in a helicopter with South working class with the Stalinist bureau­ ships and the workers in the mines and African foreign minister "Pik" Botha, cratic regime. And his purpose is to factories are flying the red banner of with whom he worked out in secret ne­ reject the program of socialist revolu­ communism and looking for revolution gotiations the withdrawal of Cuban tion, replacing it with "democracy" and '/01'1" troops from Angola? a "mixed economy"-i.e., capitalism. In South Africa, with its combative And while Siovo comes to the defense But this is not Gorbachevite "new millions-strong proletariat, the brutally of "Marxist theory," he hastens, to add thinking." The SACP renounced the oppressed black, coloured and Indian that "this is not to say that every word struggle for socialism decades ago ... population battling against overwhelm­ of Marx, Engels and Lenin must be taken under Stalin. ing force, where numerous white stu­ as gospe!.. .. " Which words exactly does Today Siovo & Co. Imagllle them- dents embrace revolutionary struggle he have in mind? Well now, it seems and even some groups of white workers that "The concept of the 'Dictatorship make common cause with the black un­ of the Proletariat' was dealt with rather ions, the SACP's commitment to the thinly by Marx as 'a transition to a maintenance (If" capitalism is a betrayal classless society' ," dixit Joe Siovo. The of monumental proportions. Trotsky's Paris Commune, which Marx and Engels program of permanent revolution ex­ saw as exemplifying this rule of the plains that in the age of imperialism working class, is dismissed as "an hourgeois democratic tasks cannot be exceptional social experience." And fulfilled without socialist revolution. In Lenin's elaboration of the concept of South Africa, even "one man, one vote" the dictatorship of the proletariat in can be achieved only by smashing the 1917 is explained as due to other special white-supremacist state through an up­ circumstances: rising of the oppressed black, centrally "Understandably, the dominant preoccu­ proletarian masses. pation at the time was with the seizure Black miners laboring in barbed-wire of power, its protection in the face of the compounds will be won to this program expected counter-revolutionary assault, of workers revolution, not to Joe Slovo's the creation of 'democracy for the ma­ no I jority' and the 'suppression of the mi­ Ruth First, South African Communist, nostrums of "power sharing" with their nority of exploiters'." murdered by death squads in 1982. "enlightened" exploiters .•

------______"~~.,I 42

From Death Row, This is Mumia Abu-Jamal From Darkness Into Light

Mandela: Amandla! (Power!) opened fire on an African protest in Seboking, leaving Black Crowd of Supporters: Ngawethu! (It is ours!) death in the double digits. Mandela: Amandla! The South Africa, then, of the massacres at Sharpeville Crowd: Ngawethu! and Langa (Uitenhage) remains a daily cruel reality. Mandela: i-Afrika! (Africa!) Why then did this racist apartheid state take the extra­ Crowd: Mayibuye! (Let it come back!) ordinary step to free an internationally acclaimed critic and Mandela: Mayibuye! political prisoner? The answer lies deeper-not in the South Crowd: i-Afrika! African heart, but in its wallet! -Prelude to Mandela's speech International anti-apartheid campaigns have cost the Pre­ in S. Africa, Feb. II, 1990 toria regime badly needed trade dollars, billions of rands (S. African dollars) lost by spreading economic sanctions. The extraordinary spectacle of South Africa's most In this light, the actions of De Klerk, the regime's presi­ renowned political prisoner, Nelson R. Mandela, emerging dent, take on an intelligible aura. from the dark confines of prison into the warm South To free one "kaffir," the government reasons, is a cheap African sunlight marked a magic moment for Africans price to pay to restore South Africa's grossly exploitative around the globe. economy. Already, De Klerk's P.R. campaign has borne The frenzied toi-toi was danced by South Africans, both fruit with a new air of acceptance hovering over the world's at home, and in exile, a dance of sheer joy at the falling image of Pretoria, although life for the average African of the last shackles of dubious legality, in a spiritual sun­ there is still more nightmare than promise. burst of loving welcome at the long-gone father, brother, Ghanian sage Kwame Nkrumah once opined that "capi­ comrade who has finally come home. talism is but the gentlemen's form of slavery." Many Black men and women wept with heartfelt joy at Is apartheid capitalism, which exploits Black labor power his coming. to undergird the racist regime, the ruffian's form of slavery? Could South Africa, the hellish spawn of every Black Yes, Mandela is free, and that is a glorious thing-but nightmare, that earthly inferno of overt oppression on all the revolution must continue for all Africans to share the Black life unlucky enough to be birthed there, really be sweet taste of freedom! Amandla! On the MOVE! changing? The answer did not take long in coming. 12 May 1990 Days before the African National Congress leader was freed, Mandela's daughter's mate, Clayton Sizwe Sithole, Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Philadelphia black journalist, is was found hung in the notorious John Vorster Square police on death row at Pennsylvania's Huntingdon state prison. station in Johannesburg. Framed up because of his political views, Jamal faces Sithole, the father of Mandela's grandson, was a mem­ death for his defiance of the racist, capitalist order. His ber of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, or Spear of the Nation, columns appear periodically in Workers Vanguard and other the ANC military wing of which Mandela, decades ago, newspapers. was a founder and commander. To get involved in the fight to save Jamal and abolish Like the police killing of rising Black activist, Steve the death penalty, contact the Partisan Defense Committee, Biko, in custody, this too was pegged "an accident," or "a P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Sta., NY, NY 10013, (212) 406-4252. suicide." Send letters to Gov. Robert Casey, Main Capitol Building, But for the Mandelas and the Sitholes, gladness was Room 225, Harrisburg, PA 17120. If you wish to correspond leavened with painful tragedy. Sithole was 22. with Jamal, you can write to: Mumia Abu-Jamal, AMR335, Days after Mandela's walk to freedom, Afrikaner police Drawer R, Huntingdon, PA 16652.

on which South African capitalism has masses, and their allies among the col­ Introduction ... been built and with it the whole edifice oured and Indian populations and among (continued Fom page 2) of white supremacy .... But as the deci­ a layer of anti-racist whites, won't be and factories and for the young rebels sive hour approaches, the ANC leaders satisfied with promises of "power shar­ in the desperate bantustans, so long as and the South African Communist Party ing"; the most conscious militants know the vicious racist capitalist state exists are the greatest obstacles to black free­ full well that what they need is nothing to enforce their exploitation and misery. dom, chaining the oppressed populations short of a revolution. It is our hope that As we have insisted, "There can be no to the apartheid masters in a 'popular this pamphlet can assist in forging a end to the system of apartheid slavery front' alliance with De Klerk and the proletarian vanguard capable of waging short of socialist revolution. Superex­ 'verligte' (enlightened) capitalists." and winning that struggle. ploitation of black labor is the bedrock Today more than ever the black -July 1991 43 reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 504, 15 June 1990 Nelson Mandela in America Smash Apartheid! For Workers Revolution! Across the u.s., hundreds of thou­ regime, and chat with President Bush, existent "negotiated solution" in South sands of people will turn out to enthu­ former head of the CIA which engi­ Africa, which means hlacks will pay. His siastically greet Nelson Mandela, leader neered his 1962 arrest (see box, page trip grows out of the talks between the of the African National Congress, who 44). He will address a joint session of ANC and the De Klerk regime in early arrives in New York on June 20, the first Congress-which talks of "sanctions" May, which came on the heels of the stop on his ten-day American tour. The against South Africa while bankrolling cop massacre in Sebokeng township, man who during his 27 years' imprison­ the Salvadoran death squad regime to where 14 black protesters were mowed ment was the symbol of the fight against the tune of a million dollars a day. In down and hundreds injured in March. apartheid slavery has also inspired black NYC there will be a ticker tape parade The apartheid rulers, hard hit by six people in America, who see in the op­ down lower Broadway, where the ANC years of black revolt and economic loss­ pression of their South African brothers leader will doubtless meet with the cap­ es, try to salvage their class rule by re­ a mirror of their own. At the same time, tains of industry and the lords of high moving some of the most glaring segre­ some of the most powerful oppressors finance. He will pose with Mayor Din­ gationist legislation, partially lifting the and exploiters of black people will join kins, and there will be an enormous state of emergency and releasing a few in a hypocritical celebration of "free­ outpouring in Harlem organized by the score political prisoners, while countless dom" while the South African masses "popular front" (including many labor thousands remain in jail. A peaceful and minorities in the U.S. bear the deadly leaders) which elected the black Demo­ resolution of the conflicting interests of weight of racial oppression. crat and now seeks to bask in Mandela's the multinational corporations and capi­ Mandela will get the red carpet treat­ popularity while imposing anti-worker talist politicians who rule South Africa ment at the White House, staunch sup­ cutbacks which hit minorities hardest. and the oppressed majority-including porters of the white-supremacist Pretoria Mandela's message will be for a non- blacks, coloureds (mixed-race) and In­ dians-is impossible. The imperialists are courting Man­ del a for they see in him the black leader whose unique authority as an anti­ apartheid fighter is necessary to con­ vince South African blacks to submit to a deal with the oppressive racist state. But despite these treacherous schemes, there will be no such "power sharing." The apartheid regime, whose wealth is based on the superexploitation of the Nelson Mandela black laboring majority, is necessarily at (left) seeks odds with the most minimal level of for­ to negotiate mal democracy. De Klerk's "reforms" "power-sharing" cannot even include the simple demand deal with of "one man, one vote" (keystone of the South Africa's American civil rights fight against Jim biggest mining Crow segregation) in a country with 28 and industrial million blacks and 5 million whites, let magnate, Gavin Reily. alone address economic equality, where white income is across the board twelve times higher than that of blacks. The London Financial Times (II June) bluntly laid out the purpose of De Klerk's negotiations: to "interrupt the

No "Power Sharing" with the Randlords!

~-... """""."""'''''.'''''''''' ..'''''------.------44

(NUSAS) via the Agency's infiltra­ tion/control of the U.S. National Stu­ CIA Set Up Mandela dent Association. The account of the U.S. official was During Nelson Mandela's visit tu the backed up by retired South African in­ U.S., he will meet with George Bush, telligence operative Gerard Ludi, who the CIA's man in the White House. Yet disclosed that the CIA was running a it was the CIA which set up Man­ highly successful "deep cover" agent dehl for arrest in 1962, leading to his in the ANC branch in Durban. The decades-long imprisonment in apart­ agent provided detailed accounts of the heid's hellhole jails. ANC's activities, including informa­ On June 10, the Atlanta Constitution tion on the whereabouts of Nelson published an article by Joseph Alhright Mandela, then being sought for his and Marcia Kunstel quoting a retired anti-apartheid activities. The morning U.S. intelligence official who verified after a secret dinner party with ANC what has long been whispered: that the members in Durban, Mr. Mandela, CIA, using an agent inside the African dressed as a chauffeur, ran into a road­ National Congress, provided South Af­ block. He was immediately recognized rican police with precise information and arrested. about Mandela's activities that led to Today as at the height of the Cold his arrest on 5 August 1962. War, the deadly U.S. "intelligence" The official recounted how, within network still has the same aim-to root out and destroy fighters against hours after Mandela's arrest, Paul Barry von Below Eckel, then a senior CIA operative, Nelson Mandela in 1961, shortly imperialism and capitalism. While the walked into his office and told him ap­ before he was forced underground. CIA was targeting anti-apartheid activ­ proximately: "We have turned Mandela ists in South Africa, in the American over to the South African security MI-5 and MI-6 as a result of withdraw­ South FBI informers were participat­ branch. We gave them every detail, ing from the Commonwealth. The CIA ing in bombings, shootings and beat­ what he would be wearing, the time of was happy to pick up the slack hy sup­ ings of civil rights marchers. The Feds' day, just where he would be. They have plying tidhits to the "friendlies" in the COINTELPRO operation sought to dis­ picked him up. It is one of our greatest racist regime. rupt black organizations and set up coups." Five years earlier, the American em­ militants for imprisonment and murder. In the Cold War summer of 1962, bassy in Pretoria had cahled Washing­ The CIA set-up of Nelson Mandela the Kennedy administration was still ton that South Africa's hlack intelligen­ makes all the more grotesque the ap­ smarting over its humiliating defeat at tsia was "psychologically susceptible peals by the South African ANC and the Bay of Pigs the year before and to the extremes of Black Nationalism American liberals to Washington to im­ gearing up to challenge Moscow to a or Communism" and that hlack radicals pose "sanctions" on The Company's nuclear showdown over Soviet missiles "could hecome a cardinal threat to junior partners in Pretoria. The fight in Cuba. In Johannesburg, the South American security." Around this time for black freedom means revolutionary African apartheid regime had lost the also, the CIA was involved in the Na­ struggle against the racist capitalist rul­ "support" of the British spy agencies tional Union of South African Students ers from Harlem to Soweto!

process of radicalisation among hlacks." hilant, Defiant" (WV No. 496, 23 Feb­ capitalists of Anglo American Corpora­ But despite the conciliation of their lead­ ruary). We predicted an upsurge of strug­ tion. About 58,000 well-off whites live ers, who are now backing away from gle among the hlack masses, who saw in comfortable neighborhoods with man­ even the "moderate" demands of the Mandela's freedom as heralding their icured lawns. Thousands of desperately Freedom Charter, South African blacks own, as well as an acute crisis of expec­ poor black miners are jammed 21 to a know their liberation can only be tations: "The smell of rebellion is in the room in the Saint Helena Mine hostel, achieved through a far-reaching social air," we wrote. Since then, revolt has and on the other side of town 138,000 revolution which smashes the apartheid spread through the rural bantustans, ur­ blacks live in shanties along dirt roads state. The fight to forge a racially inte­ ban townships have exploded with in Thabong township. Last month, ten­ grated Bolshevik party that can lead the protest and a strike wave continues (the sions in Welkom reached the flash point. struggle for a black-centered workers government calculates that the number It began with the ANC leader's release government, drawing as well on the col­ of workdays lost to strikes in the first last February. "As soon as they showed oured and Indian populations, and grow­ quarter of 1990 is four times that of the Mandela on the TV, then this started," ing numbers of whites who do not want same period last year). one white shaft steward complained. The to live their lives in a racist garrison Nowhere is this spirit more evident black miners began to wear ANC T-shirts, state, is the task of the hour. than in Welkom, Orange Free State, a militant slogans were found scrawled on gold mining town 150 miles southwest tunnel walls. They particularly objected Massacre In Welkom­ of 10hannesburg. The Welkom mine pro­ to the segregated changing rooms and South Africa in Microcosm duces 27 percent of South Africa's gold, the preference given to whites in the Last February we headlined, "Man­ and both the mine and the town are process of "hoisting." This meant whites dela Released-Black South Africa Ju- owned hy the so-called "progressive" were the last to go down and first to 45

come up, spending two to three hours Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Freedom Charter) for nationalization of less underground. As black workers be­ Welkom is one of the premier mines South Africa's mines and redistribution gan to organize, the far right in Welkom of the Anglo American Corporation, of the wealth. But in a joint news con­ formed vigilante groups organized by the which owns 70 percent of the country's ference with Gavin Reily at the Carlton, Blanke Veiligheidswag (White Security mining capital and has' been known Mandela backed off from this pledge: Guard). This fascistic outfit began "night for its "far-sighted" approach to South "I would like to share a secret with you. patrols" on the streets of Welkom that African capitalism. The company re­ The view that the only words in the eco­ meant carrying out attacks on black cently ran a full-page ad in the London nomic vocabulary that the ANC knows are nationalisation and redistribution is pedestrians. Financial Times to ask "Do We Some­ mistaken. The ANC has no blueprint that On May 16, 31 black miners were dis­ times Wish We Hadn't Fought To Have decrees that these or other assets will be missed by Anglo American for "disobey­ Black Trade Unions Recognised?" "Life nationalised, or that such nationalisation ing rules," such as by wearing ANC garb. has not always been easy since then," would take this or the other form." -London Independent, 24 May That afternoon, the fired black miners they sigh with paternalism worthy of a and a few of their union brothers ap­ latter-day Cecil Rhodes, particularly While Mandela was appealing for "co­ proached company officials outside when "our gold and coal mines" are operation of the corporate sector," Reily Shaft Number One. White security cops struck. But they sought to bring in unions said they agreed on a "mixed economy," opened fire with rubber bullets and a "for very sound commercial, as well as and that "one shouldn't jump about and 9mm pistol, wounding 18. In the clash moral, reasons." Anglo American's com­ get frightened just because people see which followed, two white mine manag­ mercial interests were clear: to set up a the word 'nationalisation'." For his part, ers were stabbed to death. Scores of collaborationist labor bureaucracy to Joe Slovo of the South African Commu­ blacks were arrested. On Sunday, May prevent an outbreak of revolutionary nist Party has been quoted as saying that 20, there was a protest meeting in the worker agitation. redistribution of wealth does not mean black township of Thabong. About 1,000 Part of this strategy has been Anglo's "sectors of the economy would have to miners and 500 youth formed a proces­ attempts to co-opt the NUM, not least be nationalised." sion after the meeting and attempted to with its "employees shareholding" in a march into Welkom. Police opened fire Imperialist Sanctions: joint fund. This draws the union into di­ Who Do They Serve? on the procession, killing II blacks and rect collaboration with finance capital. injuring 90. The ad explains that these "verligte" Mandela is using his tours of West South Africa's two most prominent (enlightened) tycoons understand there Europe and the U.S. to appeal to the im­ leaders of black unions, National Union will be no class peace until blacks have perialist chiefs to maintain "sanctions" of Miners (NUM) president Cyril Rama­ political rights. Anglo chairman Gavin against South Africa. "Sanctions must phosa and Congress of South African Reily (since retired) was the leading cap­ continue to be applied until the whole Trade Unions (COSATU) secretary gen­ italist to venture to Lusaka for "secret" structure of apartheid is brought down," eral Jay Naidoo, arrived in Welkom and talks with the ANC, which led to two he said (New York Times, 27 May). issued a conciliatory statement over the years of "negotiations" and the freeing We have pointed out how grotesque it "regrettable" stabbing. But at funerals of Mandela. Now once again, Anglo and is to call on American rulers, who for the white managers there was a col­ Reily are trying to mold the shape of a dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and umn of vehicles adorned with the "post-apartheid South Africa," orches­ Nagasaki and turned Vietnam into a swastika-like flag of the neo-Nazi Afri­ trating a late May meeting at Johannes­ moonscape, who block effective school kaner Resistance Movement (AWB). burg's Carlton Hotel of 350 leading integration in the U.S. and whose pro­ Such paramilitary and fascistic groups bankers and industrialists with a high­ gram for ghetto poverty amounts to gen­ have been growing, in reaction to De level delegation from the African ocide, to pressure their South African Klerk's talk of "power sharing" with the National Congress. junior partners to ... fight racism. We ANC. On May 26, Conservative Party At his first press conference after noted that calls for "disinvestment" were leader Treuernicht gathered more than being released, Mandela caused conster­ at best an empty moralistic gesture, that 50,000 right-wingers and neo-Nazis nation in corporate boardrooms by re­ when multinational corporations began from the AWB for a racist rally at the affirming the ANC's call (in its 1955 withdrawing productive assets it was to

White fascist paramilitary forces arming against any democratic concessions to the black majority. 46

Power of black labor can smash apartheid. Left: Militant black unionists E)\NS in Johannesburg protest anti-labor laws, October 1989.

protect their profits and, except when boycotts, today "the decisive practical national Monetary Fund and the drive a revolutionary overthrow is directly role in the sanctions campaign now lies to "mass pauperization" of the Third posed, this would serve to weaken the with world financial capital." He notes World: black unions, the organizational embodi­ that at the height of the 1985 township "The convergence of real practical bank ment of the proletarian power that can revolt, U.S. financial capital-following sanctions and the agitation of the ANC bring down apartheid capitalism. "So di­ the lead of Chase Manhattan Bank-im­ for financial sanctions marks its co­ option into the political operations of vestment has become good business. But posed financial sanctions on South Af­ world capital. Outside the environs of it is /lot good for South Africa's black rica, blocking new credits and demand­ Mrs Thatcher, it is hard to discover who workers," we summed up (WV No. 434, ing repayment of back loans. Since 19X5 does not either support or threaten to sup­ 7 August 1997). some $15 billion in foreign debt was re­ port their extension. Congresses of bish­ The Spartacist tendency (now the [n­ ops and the Trade Union Congress, the paid by South Africa, while another $10 UN and the Communist Parties, radical ternational Communist League) was billion left the country in capital flight. leftists and the far-seeing right: all look unique in telling the truth about the lib­ He observes: to the agency of money-dealing capital to undo what money-dealing capital set eral divestment movement when it was "The action of the banks in July-August in place at the founding of modern South highly unpopular to do so. But forces in 1985. setting in motion the sole effective Africa. in the period of Rhodes and process of economic ,anctions so far. COSATU have begun' questioning the Rothschild. was a measure by capital in its own policy of divestment and sanctions. "Ultimately it is the future of the workers defence against a future threatened in South Africa that is under examina­ COSATU's 19X7 congress criticized loss .... What the banks require are po­ tion .... The ANC has passed from the selective sanctions, which "cause seri­ litical changes in South Africa that can patronage of the USSR into the US ous regional unemployment." The fol­ assure them of future safety for their sphere of interest. Its guiding policy in lowing year the Chemical Workers investments. and a safe field for future investment. .. international affairs has in the last resort Industrial Union demanded that 41 hecome that of the IMF and the US foreign-controlled companies negotiate Trewhela notes that the present sanc­ hanks, the real authors of 'financial sanc­ so that divestment not be at the workers' tions policy was designed by state tech­ tions'. [n aligning themselves with this pol itics, the leaders of Cosatu, and in expense. And last year, the CW[U struck nocrats of imperialist countries (notably particular Mayekiso, have become the nine Mobil Oil installations against plans Canada and Australia, the number three means of transmission of the politics of to "divest" by selling out to the South and four gold producers in the world af­ the banks within the proletariat." African mining conglomerate Gencor, ter South Africa and the USSR). They Through collaboration with the banks in while the Metalworkers union struck were approved by meetings last year of the question of sanctions, and such Goodyear over the company's sellout to the Commonwealth foreign ministers in schemes as the Anglo American employ­ South Africa's Consol. Canberra and Commonwealth heads of ee shareholder plan and retirement fund, A recent article on "Financial Sanc­ government at Kuala Lumpur, and en­ whose first chairman is NUM secretary tions and the Future of South Africa," dorsed by the ANC, the Pan Africanist Cyril Ramaphosa (who called off the by Paul Trewhela in Scarchlight South Congress and a delegation of COSATU 19XI\ mine workers strike), these are all Aji'ica (February 1990). published in headed by Metalworkers union leader measures that bring the black unions in­ London, incisively analyzes the cause Moses Mayekiso, "formerly a leader of creasingly under the control of finance and effect of imperialist sanctions. Tre­ the left wing of the unions." By looking capital and of the capitalist state. The whela writes that while in the 1960s and to the banks as liberators, the ANC and aim. as Trewhela indicates, is "to build 1970s the ANC called mainly for inter­ its various allies and satellites arc play­ up a trade union bureaucracy and a la­ national consumer, sports and cultural ing straight into the hands of the [nter- bour aristocracy among black workers, I: II,,,

47 through which it hopes to control the separates the oppressed black maJonty democratic slogan of a constituent as­ class." Whether this is possible in South from the layer of white oppressors, far sembly is appropriate as the ANC pre­ Africa today is another matter. smaller but big enough to wage a bloody pares to abandon "one man, one vote" fight to the death. And they will. The in practice, alleging the need to assuage Black Workers Must idea that apartheid, that is to say capi­ white fears. But by itself this slogan does Take the Power! talist rule based on white supremacy, not go beyond the limits of bourgeois Trewhela holds that following the will pass peacefully into history is society. To overthrow the domination of 1985 township revolt and subsequent absurd. the capitalists who have sucked fabulous growth of black trade unions, the exist­ In the period since the Mandela­ wealth from superexploitation of the ence of the apartheid regime has become De Klerk Cape Town talks, COSATU labor of South African blacks, to ensure "anomalous" to the banks. He assumes has pushed to get in on the negotiations. equality and freedom for the oppressed that a post-apartheid capitalist state is in "We're meeting ministers almost every masses and raise them out of poverty, it gestation which will include an ANC day," glowed one NUM official, and will take nothing less than proletarian presence in the government. This as­ Ramaphosa referred to blood-drenched revolution, with black workers in the sumption is shared as well by a whole top cop Adriadn Vlok as "our minis­ vanguard. political spectrum, from De Klerk on the ter" when they met in Welkom. The Pan­ Today the contradictions in South right through Gavin Reily to Nelson Africanists oppose negotiations, but Africa are excruciating: the mood of Mandela, Joe Siovo and leftists like their slogan of "one settler, one bullet" demoralization following the exhaustion Trewhela. At most this would mean that is simply a call to drive whites out of a of the 1984-86 township revolts is past, South Africa would become another black nationalist-ruled capitalist South the working class is insurgent as never Zimbabwe (where last week Mugabe's Africa. The Azanian People's Organisa­ before, yet never before has it been so cops and army beat and tear-gassed tion (AZAPO) also criticizes the ANC politically dominated by the politics of striking schoolteachers and government negotiations with the De Klerk regime class collaboration. A socialist revolu­ workers). But this perspective is a and talks of building a "mass-based peo­ tion must be prepared and led by a genu­ conservative/liberal/reformist utopia. In pIe's organization with a socialist orien­ inely communist party, forged in strug­ fact, South Africa is barreling down the tation" (Socialist Action, June 1990). But gle against the reformism of the SACP road to civil war. its advocacy of "Black Consciousness and the petty-bourgeois nationalism of While "verlixte" capitalists and im­ philosophy" denies the central role of the ANC. It must be a racially integrated perialists would like to strike a deal with the black African proletariat capable of party, which includes not only blacks the ANC, in apartheid South Africa there leading also the oppressed, coloured and but also coloureds and Indians as well is very little middle ground. De Klerk's Indian masses as well as those whites as whites as comrades. It will be a National Party is losing votes as white who accept a racially integrated, egali­ Trotskyist party, built on the program of reactionaries dig in, arming themselves tarian South Africa. permanent revolution, which says to to defend their swimming pools, ranch Allied with AZAPO is the Cape Action black workers: the nationalists want you houses and farms built on the toil of League, whose youth group recently to pull the cart of capitalism as the black labor. Moreover, it is far from clear published a document calling for a con­ apartheid rulers have forced you to with that the maximum concessions by the stituent assembly rather than a negoti­ their sjamhoks and bullets, but you have Nationalist government can meet the ated settlement. CAL is led by Neville the power, you produced the wealth­ minimum demands of the ANC if either Alexander, whose latter-day Menshe­ take it, it's yours. side is to retain any support on its re­ vism is often misidentified as Trotsky­ Smash apartheid-For workers revo­ spective side of the yawning chasm that ism in South Africa. The revolutionary- lution in South AJi'ica! •

PIWMI IIlI 1 S RI SI AR( S --- . fj ~HllS 3

A memorial to comrade Richard S. Fraser (1913-1988), who pioneered the Trotskyist understanding of the black question in the United States. In Memoriam After joining the Trotskyist movement in 1934, Fraser was an organizer and union activist for close to 30 years and a member of the Socialist Workers Richard S. Fraser Party National Committee for 25 years. During internal debates in the SWP in the 1950s he developed and fought for the programmatic perspective of An Appreciation and S~,;.;u.,~­ Revolutionary Integration, while the majority, with George Breitman as its of His Work spOkesman, tailed the liberal pacifist/Democratic Party leadership of the civil rights movement and soon capitulated to black nationalism. The bulletin contains material reflecting the entire span of Fraser's political life, including his seminal 1953 lectures, "The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution."

~ PHIl,\!! filII ~ RJ\f-\ruIII A$7.50 £4.25 Cdn$8.50 US$7 L ' .11lj{'lln (includes postage) 108 pages Order from/make checks payable to: Australia Britain Canada United States Spartacist ANZ Publishing Co. Spartacist Publications Spartacist Canada Pub. Assoc. Spartacist Publishing Co. GPO Box 3473 PO Box 1041 Box 6867, Station A Box 1377 GPO Sydney 2001 London NW5 3EU Toronto, Ontario M5W 1 X6 New York, NY 10116 A Spartacist Pamphlet Black History and the

No.1 $.25 (16 pages) Includes: • John Brown and Frederick Douglass: Heroes of the Anti-Slavery Struggle

No.2 $.75 (32 pages) Includes: • Ten Years After Assassination: Bourgeoisie Celebrates King's Liberal Pacifism • Malcolm X: Courageous Fighter for Black Liberation • SNCC: "Black Power" and the Democrats

No.3 $.75 (32 pages) Articles from Workers Vanguard detailing the grotesque racist bombing of Philly MOVE, signature of the Reagan years.

No.4 $.75 (32 pages) Articles from the press of the Spartaclst League dealing with the military question and black oppression.

No.5 $1 (32 pages) Articles from the press of the Spartaclst League concerning the continuing struggle to finish the Civil War and fulfill the promise of black freedom.

No.6 $1 (32 pages) Includes: • Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution • Mumla Abu-Jamal Speaks from Death Row • Malcolm X on Klan Terror

No.7 $1 (40 pages) Includes: • Glory-A Review • Black Troops In Battle Against Slavery • How Mississippi Burning SI.,hAfrlca and Rewrites History Permanent Revolullon No.8 $1 (48 pages) Includes: • South Africa: Razor's Edge • Mandela Released • Smash Apartheid I For Workers Revolutionl

Make checks payable/mail to: Spartacist Publishing Co., Box 1377 GPO, New York, NY 10116 USA