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A3299-C4-2-002-Jpeg.Pdf sub-factions of -factions as accusations and counter-accusations of 'revision­ ism', 'Bukharinism' and 'Trotskyism' were bandied about in a search for ideological purity. MaJority factions had expelled minorities only to be expelled themselves in due course. Internecine doctrinal strife had displaced public political activity, $nd ultimately the Central Committee had moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town -fJai■. survwat. In Johannesburg, the Party had withered. Its debts were unpaid, its offices repossessed by landlords, its printing press sequestrated and its formal Journal 'Umsebenzi' defunct. All that remained was a semi-secret sect. My application for membership was accepted and I was placed 'on probation' for several months. I would be required to pay regular subscriptions, attend regular members' meetings, and 'carry out all tasks assigned to me'. The conditions - like most serious Party talk - were couched in a Party jargon which was new to me, heavy with references to 'aggregate meetings', 'functionaries', 'democratic centralism' and 'factionalism'. I began to learn the jargon. 'Aggregate' which I only knew in its building industry the main ingredient in a concrete mix^meant what w o root -of TMe wui III1 c u IIj * 'general meeting’. The Jargon, I discovered, was not peculiarly South African but a species of international Communist-speak derived from the Bolsheviks and the Comintern. In its most impenetrable form we knew it as 'Inprecorr' language as invariably used in the columns of the Comintern Journal: International Press Correspondence (Inprecorr.). The Communist Party not only had 'aggregate meetings'. It also had 'functionaries' rather than officials or office-bearers, a 'Political Bureau' (or PB) rather than an executive committee, and 'secretariats' in addition to secretaries. The Jargon gave the Party an air of obscurity and foreignness. But it also gave its members a feeling of belonging to a select band much as rituals and secret signs do for Freemasons or Boy Scouts. My first aggregate meeting was held at the South end of El off Street where the shopping area expired and gave way to urban wasteland. It was in a decrepit of-fice block in an unplanned sprawl of car parks, black municipal workers' compounds, municipal beerhalls and cemeteries of dead cars. The Bantu Mens' Social Centre - then the hub of the city's black cultural life - was nearby. Further south only huge windswept dumps of white mine sand. The Party office was about as far out of town as one could get while still claiming to be 'in town'. 27 The building's entrance hall and staircase were unlit. Mice, rats or cock-roaches rustled in the passageway, ft creaking wooden staircase led to a dimly lit upper landing. The Party 'premises' turned out to be a single room in which were some thirty kitchen chairs and a table, and about fifteen people, black and white. They looked me over briefly and went on gossiping amongst themselves. I recognised only one or two, members of the Labour League of Youth I had not expected to find there. No one introduced me to anyone. I sat hunched down in my chair until the meeting began. Late. I had never attended a meeting with black people before, or been in a place where there was no apparent distinction between 'us' and 'them'. I was a dislocating experience but not threatening. It all seemed so casual, so natural that settling in to it was quite easy. I had expected to find myself on a new political plane, but not a totally new world in which black and white participated as equals. They talked and I listened. My perception of the world turned upside down. Colour barriers which had been an inescapable part of my daily world at home, school and work were missing. All reason for them seemed to have disappeared. The very ordinariness of the proceedings disturbed me. I had come with romantic expectations of finding a circle of that comradeship and fraternity which had been missing from my experiences in the Labour Party. I had anticipated an atmosphere of tolerance and mutuality to fit my concept of a socialist society. It was nothing like that. Debate was fierce and adversarial. Speakers snapped at one another, attacked each other passionately and personally. The Jargon words flew - factional, sectarian, opportunist, revisionist. Could this verbal warfare really lead the way to the new world of socialism? Afterwards I came to understand that the wars of the aggregate meetings were the last throes of the years of feuding and faction-fighting which had brought the Party to its lowest ebb. I knew almost nothing of that past. I did not appreciate that this was a Party in transition, rediscovering its roots, and that exorcising old factional scores was in fact clearing the ground for a new-style Party. The meeting ended with a spiritless singi Internationale. No one spoke any words of cheer. Factions without so much as a 'goodnight', still arguing. The experience nearly turned me off the Party for ever. 28 Outside it was Saturday night, dark and wet in a deserted neighbourhood. For unexplained reasons aggregate meetings were always held on Saturday nights. I suppose it was a display o-f dedication, or a -form o-f self—flagellation like wearing a hair shirt. For everyone else, Johannesburg's Saturday nights were dedicated to 'having a good time' - drinking, dining, dancing and movie-going. Only the Communist Party imposed this monkish self-denial on itself, and even called absentees to account afterwards. I bore with the hair shirt and gradually got to know the thirty or so men and women who were the 'aggregate' of the Johannesburg Communist Party. It was 1938. The Central Committee had been transferred to Cape Town and General Secretary Moses Kotane with it. A new District Committee had just been elected to bury past factional and doctrinal struggles and revive what could be rescued. Some of the veterans of past battles remained, like Willie Kalk of the Leather Workers Union and Sam Nikin of the Furniture Workers, still fiercely combative and smouldering over past conflicts. Others seemed more reconciled to the new order, like Issy Wolfson of the Tailoring Workers Union, the eMinence grise of the black members^Edwin Mofutsanyana, and his then wife Josie Mpama (or Palmer). The committee was an uneasy mix of gladiators from a factional past and some who had only arrived after the worst internal battles had ended. It was just starting to find its feet on the road to revival. The members, a mix of native South Africans with a good number of first or second-generation European immigrants, were a fair cross-section of Johannes­ burg's population though Afrikaners and blacks were under-represented. The District Committee accordingly was over-weighted with young white members.1 The only aggregate I recall from that time was concerned with a single issue - a proposal from the Minister of Defence, Oswald Pi row, for a National Register of white citizens whose skills could be conscripted by the state in time of national need. Pirow was the cabinet's most outspoken supporter of Hitler and National Socialism. He was also the author of the Riotous Assemblies Act which seriously curtailed rights of free speech and assembly. Any National Register sponsored by him would almost certainly have some sinister anti-democratic 1 In addition to the veterans named above, the District Committee so far as I recall included Archie Lewitton, Hilda Watts (later Bernstein), Michael Harmel, Ray Adler (later Harmel), Gessie Landman and Max Joffe. The members changed slightly from year to year and brought in, inter alia, also Yusuf Dadoo, Bram Fischer, Alpheus Maliba, Rowley Arenstein and, a few years later, myself. 29 purpose. The question -for the aggregate meeting was whether or not to encourage people to register. Was the Register preparation for resistance to ■fascism and war, or the start of a Pirowite force of storm-troops against the civil population? Eli Weinberg had come from Cape Town to lead the discussion for the CC. I had never seen him before, but knew a little of his history. While still adolescent, he had been charged and imprisoned in Lithuania for left-wing activities. In South Africa with little English and no trade, he had foot-slogged his way around the country, getting the feel of it, particularly in the mountain areas of Basutoland (now Lesotho.) He had mastered English, acquired a working knowledge of Sotho and Afrikaans, and become an active trade-unionist and Secretary of the Commercial Travellers' Union.1 I forget the decisions of the CC/or. or the aggregate meeting on the National Register. It was, in any case,/no'importance. The whole idea sank from sight soon afterwards. That such a discussion took place at all, however, says something about the character of the Communist Party. There is a slightly ludicrous air around thirty ordinary citizens agonising about their attitude to a piece of legislation as if the fate of the nation depended on them. This, I soon learnt, was no more simple posturing than the declaration by the six tailors of Gloucester: 'We, the people of England...' The Party took its politics very seriously. Its small membership and following did not excuse it from its civic responsibilities. No one at that meeting could have been under any illusion that they were deciding the fate of the National Register - but that was beside the point. The point was to find the 'right line', and then to take the appropriate action which all other citizens and groups would be called on to take. This seriousness - ludicrous though some people find it - struck me as one of the Party's strengths.
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