The National Committee for The National Committee for Liberation ("ARM"), 1960- 1964 Sabotage and the Question of the Ideological Subject Andries du Toit Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the M.A. degree in History at the University of Cape Town For my Parents "All of us are living and thinking subjects. What I react against is the fact that there is a breach between social history and the history of ideas. Social historians are supposed to describe how people act without thinking, and historians of ideas are supposed to describe how people think without acting. Everybody both thinks and acts." Michel Foucault "To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." Walter Benjamin Abstract Title The National Committee for Liberation ("ARM") 1960 - 1964: sabotage and the question of the ideological subject. Subject Matter The dissertation gives an account of the history of the National Committee for Liberation (NCL), an anti- apartheid sabotage organisation that existed between 1960 and 1964. The study is aimed both at narrating its growth and development in the context of South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, and explaining its strategic and political choices. In particular, the reasons for its isolation from the broader struggle against Apartheid and its inability to transcend this isolation are investigated. Sources Discussion of the context of the NCL's development depended on secondary historical works by scholars such as Tom Lodge, Paul Rich, C. J. Driver and Janet Robertson as well as archival sources. The analysis of liberal discourse in the 1950s and 1960s also drew heavily on primary sources such as the liberal journals Contact, Africa South and The New African. Secondary sources were also used for the discussion of the NCL's strategy in the context of the development of a theory of revolutionary guerilla warfare after the Second World War: here the work of Robert Taber, John Bowyer Bell, Kenneth Grundy and Edward Feit was central. The history of the NCL itself was reconstructed from trial records, newspapers and personal interviews. Archival sources such as The Karis-Carter collection, the Hoover Institute microfilm collection of South African political documents, the Paton Papers, the Ernie Wentzel papers were also extensively used. Methodology The discussion of the discourse of liberal NCL members depended on a post-structuralist theory of subjectivity. The conceptual underpinnings of the thesis were provided by on the work of Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Michel Pcheux, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Slavoj Zizek. P~cheux's elaboration of the Althusserian concept of interpellation formed the basis of a discourse analysis of NCL texts. In the interviews, some use was also made of techniques of ethnographic interviewing developed by qualitative sociologists such as James Spradley. Conclusions The analysis focused on the way NCL discourse constructed a NCL members as "ordinary persons", a subject-position which implied a radical opposition between political struggle and ideological commitment. The NCL's strategic difficulties were related to the contradictions this discourse, related to metropolitan political traditions that valorised civil society, manifested in the context of postSharpeville South Africa. These contradictions were explored in terms of the Lacanian notion of the "ideological fantasy". The dissertation thus closes with a consideration, both of the importance of the ideological traditions identified in the analysis of NCL discourse, and the methodological importance of non-reductive conceptualisations of political identity and ideology. Andries du Toit University of Cape Town September 1990 Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements xiii 1. Introduction: sabotage and the politics of frustration 1 1.1 TheNCL/ARMinhistory 1 1.2 UnderstandingtheNCL/ARM:howdiditfail? 6 1.3 Sharpeville and Sabotage (or, Che Guevara in Stuttafords) 12 1.4 Some instructive misunderstandings: "frustration" and the question of political discourse 16 2. A Theoretical Interlude: The Ideological Subject and the Politics of the Signifier 22 2.1 Whydiscourseanalysis?Somegeneralremarks. 22 2.2 Lacan,Althusserandtheconceptofinterpellation 25 2.3 Analysing historical texts 33 3. The Development of Radical Liberalism in South Africa 37 3.1 LiberalismandRadicalpoliticsinSouthAfrica 37 3.2 The NCL/ARM, social control and the reception of Marxism in South Africa 45 3.3 Liberalism and the Second World War: democracy. anti-fascism and world opinion 53 4. The founding of the National Committee for Liberation (1960-1962) 68 4.1 TheStateofemergencyandtheformationoftheearlyNCL 68 4.2 TheSocialistLeagueofAfrica 77 4.3 RadicalLiberalsinDurban:JohnLaredoandDavidEvans 84 4.4 John Lang'sgroup 88 4.5 TheAfricanFreedomMovement 96 4.6 TheformationoftheNCLasanationalgrouping 98 5. Sabotageinthe NCL: 1962 - 1964 101 5.1 TheNewNCL:itsstructureandpoliticalprogramme 101 5.2 Goingovertoaction:sabotageafter1962 105 5.3 Thegrowth of radicalliberalismintheNCLafter1962 114 5.4 The politics of sabotage 125 6. "Ordinary People": Ideology, Fighting Unity and Technical Competence in the discourse of the NCL 132 6.1 Analysing NCL discourse 6.2 Justifying sabotage: an apparent contradiction 135 6.3 ArmedstruggleandideologicaldivisioninNCLdiscourse 137 6.4 Technical competence and fighting unity in Leftwich's conception of the role of the NCL 142 6.5 The ethics of being an amateur: the concept of the "ordinaryperson" 149 6.6 Theconceptofthe"ordinarycitizen"inhistory 153 7 The inconceivability of politics: the NCLIARM and the "ideological fantasy" 155 7.1 The mustard-seed and the prison-house: optimism and pessimism in liberal protest 155 7.2 On the bus and off the bus: the question of the "desire of the masses" 163 7.3 Liberal discourse and political choice 175 7.4 Theoretical interlude: The concept of the "ideological fantasy" 177 8. Conclusion: Amateurs, Activists and the end of the NCL. 184 8.1 Defiance and disaster 184 8.2 Amateurs, activists and the politics of civil society 201 Appendix:Documents 211 Sources Cited Preface And you may ask yourself; Wel... how did I get here? And you may ask yourself: Am I right?. Am I wrong'? And you may say to yourself: MY GOD. WA-.T HAVE I DONE? David Byrne, Once in a Lifetime In the pages that follow I have tried to tell the story of the National Committee for Liberation;t of how their moral and political concerns led to the decision to abandon non-violent, peaceful protest and to consider sabotage and armed insurrection, and how that choice led, eventually, to disaster and ruin for many of its members. In telling this story I have focused on NCLmembers' intentions, their hopes and the values that impelled them to turn to sabotage. But besides this I have also tried to show the broader discursive network which shaped these concerns and gave them their particular meaning. For although nothing seems more obvious than the feeling that we know ourselves and know what we think, this sense of self-prescnce, this belief that our own identities are transparently available to us, obscures the extent to which our intentions are shaped by a greater text, and hides the broader discursive frameworks that give us our positions as subjects, and install us in the places from which we survey the world. That is one way of telling the story. There are other ways. Certainly, when I set out to study the political thought and practice of liberal intellectuals after Sharpeville, I never suspected that I would end up focusing on the NCL/ARM to the extent that I did: that my course of research would lead me far from the archives and libraries of the University of Cape Town, to interview ex-saboteurs in England and Europe. Neither did I expect that my research would lead me to question many of my own assumptions about ideology and subjectivity; that my decision to move away from philosophy to history would eventually lead me back to philosophy, so that at the moment I do not belong comfortably or completely in either realm. In this preface, therefore, I hope to give an account of the process by which this thesis became a narrative of the history of the NCL/ARM, and how that narrative came to be so closely concerned vith the nature of ideological subjectivity. The fact that the name of this organisation changed front the National Committee for Liberation (NCL) to the African Resistance Movement IARIM) just before its demise may be a source of confusion. I have used the term "NCL/AR.M" "hen I refer to the entirety of the organisation's existence. from 1960 to 1964. When referring to it at any specific moment. I have used the name applicable during that time: i.e. "National Committee for Liberation" before June 1904 and "African Resistance Moveiment" thereafter. My own decision to move from the Department of Political Philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch to the Department of History at the University of Cape Town was in itself what Althusserians like to call an "overdetermined" event. In part it was motivated by practical considerations; in part to a growing sense that the Socratic tradition that informed the Department of Political Philosophy, a tradition that had sustained us as students in our commitment to philosophy, was being thrown increasingly into crisis by the events of the mid1980s. That critical intellectual and moral tradition, articulated above all by the Head of Department, prof. Johann Degenaar. had made the Department a crucial reference point for generations of students, and had turned it into an important base from which their own dissent and criticism of the Nationalist hegemony at Stellenbosch could be articulated, As that hegemony became less monolithic, and as a pluralist and reformist pragmatism started to replace the ideology articulated by Malan and Verwoerd. that critical tradition was itself placed in an ambiguous position.