Between Racial Capitalism and Revolutionary Socialism:
Revolutionary Syndicalism, the National Question and South African Socialism, 1910-1928

Paper presented at: The Burden of race? "Whiteness" And "Blackness" in modern South Africa
History Workshop and Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg - 5 July to 8 July 2001

Abstract

This paper provides a new analysis of socialist positions on the "national question" in South Africa in the early twentieth century. Most discussion on this issue has tended to centre on a dichotomy between the theory of "national democratic revolution" and the theory of "permanent revolution". This paper argues that not only have the differences between these two positions been exaggerated, but that the reduction of discussions to these two poles has been premised on the failure to examine alternative socialist strategies. In particular, there has been a failure to consistently or accurately examine pre-Communist Party of South Africa (1921) positions, which were, in the main, dominated by revolutionary syndicalist perspectives, rooted in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. Instead, there has been an uncritical acceptance of the Stalinist interpretation of South African socialist history established by Communist intellectuals in the 1940s.

Revolutionary syndicalism - a libertarian socialist position hostile to both the State and capitalism, arguing instead for the trade unions to seize power through a revolutionary general strike - profoundly influenced the early socialist movement. South African revolutionary syndicalists, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World, the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL) and the Industrial Workers of Africa, argued for a fusion of the struggle against racism and the struggle against capitalism through the axis of a revolutionary non-racial "One Big Union" that would ultimately seize and place under self-management the means of production. This provides the basis for a critique of the literature - dominated by interpretations developed by Communist Party intellectuals who deny the influence of revolutionary syndicalism and grossly caricature the positions of the revolutionary syndicalists - as well as a basis for a reconceptualisation of the chronology of socialist positions on the national question in South Africa. The implications of my analysis for contemporary socialist strategy with regard to the national question are addressed in the conclusion.

 

... In common with the Labour movement elsewhere in the world, South Africa passed through a period of vigorous reaction against politics on the working-class front ... The disillusion of the workers’ movement in the value of parliamentary reform was now spreading from Europe, from Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand ... From America came the ringing call to action of Haywood and Eugene Debs of the IWW, while from France was spreading an enthusiasm for the doctrines of the revolutionary Syndicalists with their faith in the industrial struggle and the general strike and their mistrust of politics ...

R.K. Cope, Comrade Bill: The Life and Times of W.H. Andrews, Workers’ Leader

 

Can we talk of the Cause of the Workers in which the cries of the most despairing and the claims of the most enslaved are spurned and disregarded? The new movement will break the bounds of Craft and race and sex. It will be founded on the rock of the meanest proletarian who toils for a master. It will be as wide as humanity. It will recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour.

The International, 3 December 1915, "The Wrath to Come"

 

We are here for Organisation, so that as soon as all of your fellow workers are organised, then we can see what we can do to abolish the Capitalist-System. We are here for the salvation of the workers. We are here to organise and to fight for our rights and benefits

A. Cetiwe, speech to meeting of Industrial Workers of Africa, May 1918

 

         

Introduction

This paper will examine how socialists sought to approach the "national question" – specifically, racial oppression – in South Africa in the early twentieth century. South Africa provides a useful case study to examine how socialists in this period approached questions of broad social oppression. One reason for this is that the country's capitalist industrialisation process was deeply intertwined with processes of colonial domination. A second is that most significant currents of revolutionary socialist thought have been represented in South Africa at one point or another, which also suggests the use of the country as a case study in the examination of differing socialist approaches to the national question. This paper proceeds from a recognition that revolutionary socialist tendencies, whether Marxist or anarchist in approach, have, whilst basing themselves on the notion of class struggle, consistently sought to engage with broader forms of social and economic oppression, often codified as a series of "questions". Foremost among these was the "national question": following the 1848 revolutions, in which both socialist and national liberation movements came to the fore in European politics, the "national question" became "as much a concern for revolutionaries in Europe as ' social emancipation ' an issue that no major revolutionary figure in Europe could ignore." This concern remained central as socialist ideas spread into other regions of the world in subsequent years. Hence, the debate on the "national question" within the broad socialist movement must be understood as centring less on whether or not to resolve this "question" – although evidently some positions could have this effect in practice - and more on the issue of how best to do so. Consequently, this paper rejects the fashionable critique that revolutionary socialism and class analysis are "class-reductionist".

Focussing on the period 1910-1928, this paper provides a new analysis of socialist positions on the "national question" in South Africa in the early twentieth century. This period is significant for several reasons. It was only in the early twentieth century that an organised revolutionary socialist movement emerged in South Africa, and it was in this period that the key positions that continue to define left positions on the national question were formulated. Furthermore, it is possible to discern three distinct socialist approaches in South Africa to the "national question" in this period: those of revolutionary syndicalism, "Stalinism" and "Trotskyism".

This paper makes several core arguments. Firstly, the case is made that the differences between Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches to the resolution of the national question have been greatly exaggerated, and obscure the more fundamental difference between these two approaches and that of revolutionary syndicalism. The difference between Stalinist and Trotskyist positions, on the one hand, and revolutionary syndicalist positions on the other, has also been obscured by conventional interpretations of South African socialist history, which remain dominated by the teleological analyses developed by Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), founded in 1921 (replaced by the South African Communist Party, or SACP, in 1953) aligned intellectuals. At the centre of these conventional interpretations is the notion that pre-CPSA socialists at best ignored the national question, and at worst accommodated to white racism, and that it was only with the rise of the CPSA that this issue began to be adequately addressed.

The paper argues,further, that this view of the pre-CPSA left is inaccurate ' is indeed, often a caricature and falsification of the historical record' insofar as the pre-1921 left did, indeed, have a comprehensive, consistent, radical, and distinct, position on the national question that has, essentially, been written out of history. This alternative socialist strategy, and pre-CPSA movement, was dominated by a revolutionary syndicalist perspective, and rooted, ultimately, in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin. The pre-CPSA revolutionary left, represented by organisations such as the South Africa section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), and the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), argued for a fusion of the struggle against national oppression and the struggle against capitalism and the capitalist State through a revolutionary, non-racial, "One Big Union" that would overcome the racial divisions within the working class, forcibly remove racial laws, and also seize, and place under working class control, the means of production. This line of argument situates the South African revolutionary syndicalists of the 1910s squarely in line with the general anti-racist orientation of the international revolutionary syndicalist movement.

         

Stalinism, Trotskyism and revolutionary syndicalism

I use the term "revolutionary syndicalism" interchangeably with "anarcho-syndicalism" to designate an anti-authoritarian, or libertarian, socialist current that derives from classical anarchism, and centred on the notion that the trade unions are the authentic class organisations of the working class that can and must seize and place under self-management the means of production through a revolutionary general strike. Revolutionary syndicalism’s fundamental opposition to both capitalism and to the State structure itself stands in marked contrast to the positions adopted by both Stalinism and Trotskyism.

Revolutionary syndicalism was a powerful influence on the left wing of the international labour movement between the 1890s and the 1930s. Whilst the intellectual roots of revolutionary syndicalism may be found in the classical anarchism of Mikhail Bakunin, who challenged Karl Marx for control of the International Workingmen’s Association (1864-1877), it was in the 1910s and 1920s that revolutionary syndicalism enjoyed its "glorious period". Between the 1890s and 1930s, revolutionary syndicalists strongly influenced labour movements in countries as varied as Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Sweden, the United States of America, and Venezuela, and controlled the main trade unions and trade union federations in countries such as Argentine, Brazil, Cuba, Portugal, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent, France and Spain. In its anti-statism, anti-authoritarianism, and stress on direct – as opposed to electoral – action, revolutionary syndicalism is an example of a broader libertarian socialist current. In English-speaking countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, the revolutionary syndicalist wave was exemplified by the IWW, which had sections in these countries, as well as in Chile, Mexico and Peru. The IWW spelt out its militant creed in the famous Preamble of the IWW:

' The working-class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, and abolish the wage system '

Following the seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 by the Russian Social-Democratic Party Maximalists – the "Bolsheviks" – led by V.I. Lenin, who advocated the need for a revolutionary elite, organised as a vanguard party, to seize State power and implement socialism from above through a "proletarian dictatorship", the new Communist movement increasingly eclipsed anarcho-syndicalism as an influence on radical labour. Not only could the supporters of Leninism point to what was, ostensibly, a successful revolution and socialist outpost, but the new Communist movement also received significant financial and political support from the new Soviet Union at a time when the anarcho-syndicalists fell victim to severe State repression. However, the new Communist movement soon fragmented into two rival tendencies, Stalinism and Trotskyism, which emerged as political currents within the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s.

The terms "Stalinism" and "Trotskyism" emerged as a result of the split in the ruling Bolshevik Party leadership that emerged after Lenin’s death, a split which led, eventually, to Joseph Stalin’s assumption of power in the Soviet Union in 1927-1928, and Leon Trotsky's subsequent exile and murder in Mexico in 1940. It was in the course of this struggle that the basic differences between the two positions were sharpened and clarified, and assumed organisational forms: in the first place, that of factions within the main Communist Parties, but subsequently, that of competition between rival groupings of aspirant vanguard parties.

The differences between Stalinism and Trotskyism consist, at base, in the following: Stalinism defends the possibility of socialism sustaining itself a single country, and consequently recognises and advocates the possibility of different national roads to socialism being taken in different countries at different times; Trotskyism insists on the international nature of a genuine revolution, and consequently insists that national revolutions can, at best, lead to degenerated or deformed forms of socialism; Stalinism defends, uncritically, the experience of the Soviet Union, admitting only to minor imperfections; Trotskyism analysed the Soviet Union as a degenerated "workers’ state" dominated by a parasitic "bureaucracy" that had to be removed through a "political revolution" led by a new party of the working class. Trotsky insisted that the Soviet Union was a fundamental advance for humanity, and, like the Stalinists, called for its unconditional military defence against external aggression.

There are, thus, clear differences in orientation between the Stalinist and Trotskyist traditions. However, these differences should not be unduly exaggerated, as Stalinism and Trotskyism converge in a significant number of respects: both situate themselves within the Marxist camp, albeit in opposition to the "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International (1889-1914), both lay claim to Lenin’s mantle and political legacy, both defend the Leninist stress on the centrality of the vanguard party and the need for "proletarian dictatorship" through a "workers’ state", both advocate(ed) the unconditional defence of the Soviet Union against attack, and both implicitly defend the experience of the early years of the Russian Revolution as a model for socialist revolution everywhere. Indeed, there are even more points of similarity than these - as I will demonstrate further convergences in my discussion of the two tendencies - approaches to the national question below but it may be noted for now that both tendencies are also examples of "political socialism", the general tendency within the broad socialist movement that advocates "a political battle against capitalism waged through ' centrally organised workers’ parties aimed at seizing and utilising State power to usher in socialism." This paper will therefore classify both Stalinism and Trotskyism as varieties of Leninism because insufficient grounds exist for declaring one the "true" Leninist approach, and the other, heresy, which is the traditional approach of partisans of each respective tendency.

As the official Communist movement, represented by national Communist Parties and the Communist International (or Comintern, 1919-1943), Stalinism historically overshadowed Trotskyism in terms of size, resources and implantation within the working class, with Trotskyism, with few exceptions, unable to effectively compete for influence within the working class; certainly Trotskyism has never been a serious rival for influence within the South African situation. Hence, it may be said that anarcho-syndicalism’s real rival for influence within the international labour movement has always been Stalinism, and never Trotskyism. Nonetheless, Trotskyism’s analyses of the South African national question are of great interest and will be returned to later.

         

Racial capitalism and colonial domination in South Africa, 1886-1928

Before doing so, however, it is necessary to outline the material conditions with which these three tendencies were confronted in South Africa in the early twentieth century. Previously marginal to international processes of capital accumulation, the territory that would become known as South Africa attracted substantial amounts of capital following the discovery of diamond and gold deposits in the interior, in 1867 and 1886, respectively.

Now amongst the "focal points of capitalistic activity in the world economy", the political economy of the region underwent substantial change. Vast urban areas emerged, notably Kimberley in the south, and the giant Witwatersrand complex in the interior, centred on the gold-mining town of Johannesburg, and its band of satellites, ranging from Carletonville on the far west rand, through Randfontein, Krugersdorp, and Roodepoort, and continuing through Germiston, Boksburg, Benoni, Brakpan and Springs on the east rand. In 1886, Johannesburg had about 3,000 prospectors; ten years later, it was a city of 100,000, and by 1913, it housed 250,000.

Massive capital investments underpinned the rapid emergence of a technologically sophisticated deep-mining sector, which in turn provided an impetus for the development of secondary industry and the rapid commercialisation of the previously stagnant white-owned farms of the interior. Ownership of the diamond and gold mines was soon centralised in the hands of a few giant capitalist companies, who were further linked to one another through a Chamber of Mines formed in 1887. Gold output grew steadily: by 1898, the Witwatersrand produced 27 percent of the world’s gold output, and this rose to 40 percent by 1913.

State power was also rapidly centralised: although diamonds and gold were not the only reasons for renewed British imperialist interest in the South African interior, imperial interest in keeping the Witwatersrand within the ambit of the British Empire contributed directly to the first annexation of the Afrikaner Transvaal republic (1877), a series of colonial wars against the Zulu and Pedi (both defeated in 1879), and the brutal war against the Afrikaner republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State which lasted from 1899 to 1902. At least 28,000 Afrikaners (whites descended from colonists who came to South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and 14,000 Africans, died in British concentration camps during this war. The two British colonies of the Cape and Natal were then merged with the two defeated Afrikaner republics in 1910 to form a British dominion called the Union of South Africa.

What is of particular interest for the purposes of this paper is the colonial character of the capitalist relations of production that developed in the new mining industry. The majority of the new workers on the mines were African labourers forced into the labour market through hut taxes, labour taxes, and restrictions on land ownership and access enacted by colonial governments in the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. African workers were typically male migrants who worked on contracts of limited duration sometimes lasting a year' following which they returned to their rural homes and families in the defeated and dismembered African kingdoms. Because these workers were not fully separated from the means of production, employers could pay "bachelor" wages on the grounds that the workers' families supposedly subsisted by farming in the rural areas.

African wages were also held down by the Chamber of Mines, which set up official agencies to recruit African workers for its members: the Native Recruitment Corporation, operating within South Africa proper, and the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, recruiting from countries in the region. The Portuguese colony of Mozambique was particularly significant: between 1904 and 1929 it supplied at least 40 % of the Transvaal African labour force. The aim of this monopsony was to set a standard level for African wages and prevent upward pressure in wages as a result of mining houses competing for labourers.

Very low wages were also secured by subjecting the African workers to coercive labour practices including indenture, pass controls over movement, and housing in tightly regulated and closed compounds on the mine premises. These regulations applied specifically to African workers and built on practices of unfree labour from the pre-industrial colonial period. Further, Africans (like Coloureds and Indians, and unlike whites, who had manhood suffrage from 1907 onwards) were largely disenfranchised, with the exception of a small petty bourgeois layer in the Cape and Natal. All of these mechanisms helped prevent African worker unionisation and held African wages at the extremely low levels needed to make the Witwatersrand’s vast amounts of low-grade ore profitable on world markets. In 1913, there were 195,000 Africans on the mines - mainly miners, but including layers such as clerks and policemen - and a further 37,000 African workers in domestic service, and 6,000 working in factories, workshops and warehouses.

In addition to African workers, the new urban areas had small communities of Coloureds, a racially mixed people largely descended from the slaves imported into the Cape colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth century from Asia and Africa, and Indians, imported into Natal in the 1860s as indentured farm labourers. There were also 38,500 white workers on the Witwatersrand in 1913: 22,000 worked on the mines, 4,500 on the railways, and the remainder in building, tramways, printing, electricity and other industries. Initially most white miners were immigrants from abroad, up to 85 percent of whom were British-born in the 1890s, often arriving in South Africa via other mining regions, and attracted by the prospects of employment at unusually high wages. On the mines, wages for professional miners and some artisans were generally at least double, and sometimes up to five times, higher than wages for comparable categories of worker in other settled mining areas.

The structure of the working class created serious tensions within its ranks. On the one hand, the working class was occupationally stratified. The white working class was divided between artisans, such as the miners, organised into craft unions, and a large local "poor white" layer drawn from Afrikaners proletarianised by the stratification within their rural society and by the wartime devastation of their farms. Many of this under-employed layer were resident in Johannesburg’s multi-racial slums, and involved in criminal and trading activity. On the other hand, the working class was divided by race and skill, categories that strongly overlapped. White miners typically earned about five times the wages of African miners in this period, reflecting, in turn, the differential relations existing between these different fractions of the working class and the capitalist class. African miners were a colonised people who entered the labour market under a coercive regime; skilled white workers were drawn from the labour markets of Australia, North America and Europe by the promise of higher wages. The other non-African minorities, the Coloureds and Indians, were largely situated in an intermediary position. In the Cape, there was a noticeable layer of Coloured artisans, and many occupied semi-skilled positions elsewhere; in Natal, Indians were a significant proportion of manufacturing workers.

For white workers this situation was fraught with peril: employers consistently sought to fragment artisanal jobs and replace expensive white labour with cheap semi-skilled Africans; many unskilled whites found that employers preferred rightless Africans in labouring jobs. Yet for all workers – although most especially Africans – conditions on the Witwatersrand in this period were shocking. Living costs were high, housing poor and in short supply, and the ravages of silicosis on African and white miners severe: in the first decade of the 1900s, their average working life was twenty-eight years shorter than that of the average male population. Illnesses such as pneumonia also took their toll: in 1903, nearly 5,000 African miners died of this illness. Labour repression was applied to both African and white workers in the first two decades of the twentieth-century. Strikes and desertion by African workers were generally forcibly suppressed, yet even the white trade unionists who organised general strikes in 1913, 1914 and 1922 found themselves facing the guns of imperial and local troops.

White labour, however militant, was rarely revolutionary. It was dominated by a chauvinist "white labourite" tradition similar to that of mainstream Australian labour and large sections of American labour. The early labour movement in South Africa, which emerged from the 1880s onwards, was largely made up of craft unions established by immigrant whites. Faced with replacement by unfree African labour, these unions typically advocated the reservation of specific jobs for white workers, doing so as early as 1896, and barred Africans from membership. This demand was retained by early twentieth-century craft union federations such as the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council and the South African Industrial Federation as well as by the craft union-sponsored South African Labour Party, which won six out of 121 seats for the 1910 all-white elections on a strictly segregationist platform.

A further element of the social mix on the early Witwatersrand was the African petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie. The Cape Colony, in particular, adhered for much of the nineteenth century to a liberal mid-Victorian vision of assimilating suitable colonial subjects into non-racial gentry. The African petty bourgeoisie, an educated stratum engaged in the professions and in commerce rooted in the mission stations and early towns, could soon be found in Kimberley and on the Witwatersrand. With the retreat of mid-Victorian liberalism in the face of late nineteenth-century imperialism, and the parallel rise of racist science, the insecurity of this stratum became acute, trapped as it was between increasingly limited access to the elite, and growing employer demands for cheap African labour. Its response was to found the African nationalist movement, exemplified by the SANNC, which was established in January 1912 by the "chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race", as one delegate approvingly noted. Opposed to racial discrimination, the class agenda of the African nationalists was assimilation into the capitalist mainstream, and its favoured tactics at the time were those of reasoned moderation, petitioning, deputations to authority, and professions of loyalty to established authority.

         

The "national question" and revolutionary socialism in South Africa, 1927-1933

The racial divisions within the working class, and the racial structuring of capitalism, posed a very difficult and complex national question for socialists in South Africa. Among the issues raised were the relationship between the socialist project and the African nationalist movement, the role of white labour in the movements for national liberation and socialist change, and the relationship between national liberation and socialism itself.

For, in South Africa, racial divisions amongst workers were not simply based on sentimental prejudice but existed and were reproduced in a racialised labour process and a racially segmented labour market; further, racism was not simply an ideological aspect of capitalist hegemony, but fundamentally intertwined with the process of capital accumulation itself. Hence, the national question posed tactical challenges for the building of a working class movement, as well as posing challenges around the strategy and ultimate aims of the socialist movement itself. At the same time, the historic development of capitalism in South Africa tended to foreclose on some of the more conventional solutions to national oppression, such as secession or national autonomy, insofar as the early struggles of the white working class suggested it might play an important role in a national liberation project in the country, and insofar as the existence of a common economy made a territorial division improbable.

Before moving on to discuss the approach developed by the organisations characterised at the start of this paper as revolutionary syndicalist, this paper will deal with the Stalinist and Trotskyist views on the national question in South Africa. This task will be undertaken by reference to the official positions taken by local organisations aligned with each tendency in the period under review, viz., the CPSA, on the one hand, and the Workers’ League of Africa (founded in 1932) and the Lenin Club (founded in 1933), on the other.

The CPSA was formed in July 1921 by a diverse collection of far left groupings in South Africa, including the IndSL and the ISL, with the latter providing most of the early leadership and activists, as well as a printing press and a weekly newspaper, the International, which continues today as the rather more infrequent Umsebenzi ("The Worker"). Throughout the early 1920s, the CPSA tended to lack clear strategic positions on a range of issues, not least of which was the national question.

The Party’s early eclecticism – which included a continued revolutionary syndicalist influence – was, however, ended in 1927 and 1928 when the Comintern began to pressurise the CPSA to adopt a "Native Republic" thesis. The Comintern’s position on the colonial and semi-colonial countries had been left somewhat vague in its early congresses, and became the central item on the agenda after 1925. As such, however, it became embroiled in the Stalin/Trotsky factional struggle, with each side developing apparently distinct positions on the issue. The "Native Republic" thesis is a prime example of the developing Stalinist approach to social struggle in colonial and semi-colonial countries, and maintained that the immediate task of the South African revolution was national liberation of African people from foreign and racial domination; in its original formulation, this struggle was to be led by the rural "peasantry".

At the 1928 sixth world congress of the Comintern the "Native Republic" thesis was adopted as official Comintern policy. Despite fierce internal debate within the CPSA on the issue, with Party members such as S.P. Bunting, T.W. Thibedi, and Eddie Roux expressing serious reservations, the organisation adopted a version of the thesis in January 1929. This described the CPSA’s aim as "An Independent South African Native Republic as a stage towards the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic, guaranteeing protection and equality to all national minorities".

The reasons why the CPSA came to adopt this thesis need not detain us at this point. What is crucial about the "Native Republic" thesis is the manner in which it diachronically separates national liberation and socialism into separate stages and strategic tasks. Although the thesis may be read as positing a necessary, and logical, progression from national liberation to socialism, it does have three important practical implications: firstly, the national liberation struggle is denuded of any evident working class character insofar as the crucial "actor" in the first stage is the colonised nation including the national bourgeoisie; secondly, the thesis disarticulates national liberation from any change in the relations of production insofar as it, in effect, claims that national liberation can be – indeed, must be – achieved prior to socialism, and, so, assumes that full national liberation can be achieved under capitalism and yet, at the same time, lay the basis for a transition to socialism; and thirdly, the thesis tends to treat nationalism as the true bearer of national liberation for the whole people, rather than analyse it as a particular approach to national liberation.

In practice, then, the thesis made it clear that the immediate strategic task of the Communist Party was not "communism," but decolonisation; the Party’s field of operation was not the working class, per se, but all classes in the oppressed nation, explicitly including the African bourgeoisie; whilst it was important to organise workers, the political content of the workers’ movement had to be framed within the goals of national liberation, whilst the Party also had to work within, and help radicalise, rather than compete with, the African nationalist movement. These conceptions, which were later elaborated and modified as the thesis of "Colonialism of a Special Type" (CST) – wherein black South Africa was conceptualised as an "internal colony" of white South Africa – still form the basis of the SACP’s ongoing alliance with the African National Congress (ANC), and underlie the SACP’s strategic goal of "national democratic revolution" in South Africa.

This "two-stage" conception immediately came under fire from South Africa’s emergent Trotskyist movement, which began to coalesce in the late 1920s. The origins of South African Trotskyism are at once international and national: international insofar as the emergence of a South African Trotskyist tendency from the late 1920s echoed the struggle within the Soviet Union and the Comintern in this period; national insofar as the early Trotskyist cadre were drawn largely from CPSA activists expelled from the Party in waves of purges that began in 1930, removed almost all the ISL and IndSL veterans, including Thibedi and Bunting, and reduced the Party to impotence with around 150 members by 1933 (this was down from nearly the 3,000 members claimed in 1929).

The first organised Trotskyist organisation on the Witwatersrand was an ephemeral Communist League of Africa, founded in 1932 by Thibedi, followed by a succession of small Trotskyist groups in Johannesburg. In the Western Cape, which was to become the historical stronghold of South African Trotskyism, the first organisation was the Lenin Club, which was formed in 1933. It split soon after, with its majority faction joining with Johannesburg-based groups to form the Workers Party of South Africa in 1935, and the remainder forming the Communist League of South Africa. The South African Trotskyists were, from the start, characterised by centrifugal tendencies, and were also disunited in their response to the two-stage theory of the CPSA.

Despite their myriad differences, the two factions concurred with the CPSA that imperialism and racial domination had to be combated, and they agreed, also, that a resolution of the land question was a central aspect of the South African revolution. However, they differed from the CPSA in several fundamental ways: in the first place, both maintained that the working class had to lead the revolutionary movement in South Africa, and operate in an alliance with the rural poor; in the second place, both placed great emphasis on the immediate need to unite black and white workers in South Africa (a task relegated to the second stage by the CPSA) as the leadership of the rural poor; and, in the third place, both maintained that the struggle against imperialism, and for democratic rights and the resolution of the land question, which implied black majority rule, would transform itself, uninterruptedly, into a revolution against capitalism, a "permanent revolution". This is not, of course, to overstate the theoretical clarity of the Trotskyists, or deal exhaustively with the minutiae of their differing programmes and emphases: the point is that both factions did develop their programmes within the framework of the "permanent revolution" thesis.

As such, these organisations’ views both converged with, and underlined the limitations of, Trotsky’s approach to the national question in colonial and semi-colonial countries. As originally formulated, the theory of the "permanent revolution" maintained that in conditions of late development, the bourgeoisie was too weak to carry out its supposed historic "bourgeois-democratic" tasks of ending feudal landlordism, instituting basic democratic rights, securing national independence and fostering economic development. As a result, these ostensibly necessary "bourgeois-democratic" tasks had to be undertaken by the working class movement itself, in alliance with the peasantry: in other words, the working class would carry out the bourgeois-democratic revolution in lieu of bourgeois revolutionaries. Such a substitution could not be without consequences: Trotsky insisted that the working class might, emboldened by its new found power, proceed (under the appropriate leadership, of course) to make the socialist revolution as well: in these conditions, he wrote, "The democratic revolution grows over immediately into the socialist, and thereby becomes a permanent revolution."

         

Beyond the Stalinist/ Trotskyist dichotomy

As argued above, there are many points of convergence on general issues between Stalinism and Trotskyism. These include the shared belief in the necessity of a vanguard party and a dictatorship of the proletariat expressed in the existence of a workers’ state, and the common roots of both within the Marxist tradition. A closer look at the approach of each current to the national question also reveals substantial similarities. Both accept the necessity for a "bourgeois-democratic" stage as a discrete historical period, and both accept that such a stage will lay the basis for the transition to socialism. Both are, thus, still trapped within the broader Marxist notions, firstly that a bourgeois revolution is a precondition for a working class revolution, and, secondly that the rise of the national bourgeoisie is associated with the extension of democratic and land reforms; the latter are seen as intimately linked to the rise of the bourgeoisie as a class, rather than, as the anarchist Peter Kropotkin argued, concessions forced upon bourgeois revolutionaries and the bourgeois revolutions by the struggles of the working class and peasantry. Hence, there is no need to exaggerate the dichotomy between the "two-stage revolution" and "permanent revolution", as both are better understood as variations on a broader principle of revolution by stages within the Marxist tradition rather than truly alternative socialist strategies.

An additional convergence between Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches in South Africa also exists in their general understanding of the historical development of the socialist tradition in the country, something that they share with academic historians. Whilst scholars and activists have debated the applicability of the "Native Republic" thesis and its subsequent evolution to the South African situation, as well as pointed to the Party’s own inconsistent application of the thesis, almost all concur that the adoption of the thesis was, nonetheless, a fundamental advance for the local socialist movement, insofar as the pre-1921 left is argued, or is assumed, to have, at best, ignored the national question and, at worst, pandered to white racism. Thus, for Drew, the thesis was "a significant advance ' for the first time socialists put South Africa’s pressing social problems ' at the top of their political programme," for Legassick, the ISL basically ignored the national question whereas as the CPSA at least sought to deal with it, and for Johns, the new programme of the Comintern "did draw the attention of the South Africans to the national, colonial and agrarian aspects of the South African situation which they had previously neglected." From this perspective, too, the Trotskyist reaction to the "Native Republic" thesis is itself testimony to the importance of this thesis in centring socialist debates around an ostensibly previously neglected national question.

The assumption that the pre-1921 left ignored, or pandered to, racial oppression in South Africa is, as I will show below, fundamentally incorrect and based on, at best, a misunderstanding and inadequate researches on the pre-CPSA period, and, at worst, deliberate falsification of the record. What is significant to note at this point is that the notion of the 1928 position as a fundamental advance for socialism in general is itself based upon, and reflects the continuing hegemony of, the interpretation of socialist history in South Africa set out by CPSA- and SACP- aligned intellectuals from the 1940s onwards, and elaborated over the next four decades. These interpretations, which centre on two notions 'that the pre-CPSA left was at once largely Marxist in orientation and incapable of properly answering the national question' may be traced through the works of R.K. Cope (1940?), Eddie Roux (1944, 1948), Lionel Forman (1959), Jack and Ray Simons (1965, hereafter "the Simons"), "Lerumo" (Michael Harmel, 1971), Brian Bunting (1975, 1981), and Jeremy Cronin (n.d., 1991).

These writers, who produced the first published histories of socialism in South Africa, were all associated with the Party on one way or another, and their works reflect and articulate the version of socialist history and correct socialist policies held by that Party. For this reason, I refer to these works as the "Communist school" of South African socialist history. For the "Communist school", the evolution of the CPSA and SACP is presented in the literature as a process of ongoing and continual advance.

This teleological evolution of the Party propounded by this interpretation is marked by a series of important milestones. The Party emerges from the "Communist nucleus" of "true socialists" in the ISL, who had, within an uneven ISL, championed an anti-war analysis "closely approaching the stand of Lenin", supposedly anticipated the formation of the Comintern, and developed an "unerring" interpretation of the Russian Revolution. The "true socialists" typically signalled out for praise in this regard are three founder members of the ISL: W.H. "Bill" Andrews, S.P. Bunting, and David Ivon Jones (who was the ISL’s delegate to the Comintern). These three, always presented as the leaders of the ISL, apparently fought against the supposed chauvinism of many ISL members, almost single-handedly switching the revolutionary "nucleus" on to the correct tracks, whilst at the same time fighting off the sectarians and ultra-leftists on their left.

For the most part this was a role they continued to assume in the CPSA. Bunting, his protégé Roux tells us, committed the Party for the first time to taking the black working class seriously in a tumultuous congress in 1924. This helped open the way for the subsequent adoption of the "Native Republic" thesis, which the Simons, like the academics cited above, describe as a "great advance in the analysis of the relations between national and class forces in the liberation movement," a "dramatic" change that placed the Communists "squarely on the side of national liberation." Despite some difficulties in the 1930s, despite false starts and several workerist deviations, this correct understanding finally culminated in an enduring alliance between the Party and the ANC for "national democracy" in the 1950s. The Party thus eventually became "the pace-setter in the united front of liberation, centred on the African National Congress; the front rank detachment of the national democratic revolution." In the Simons' sanguine formulation, at last "the class struggle had merged with the struggle for national liberation."

The notion that it was only with the formation of the CPSA that the national question began to receive due attention in South Africa is echoed in a broader assumption about the historical significance of the Leninist tradition as a whole at the international level. Both Stalinist and Trotskyist analyses of the national question commonly share the Leninist notion that the national question was never adequately dealt with by socialists - including Marxists - in the pre-Leninist era.

Lenin, for his part, specifically critiqued the "orthodox" Marxism of the Second International for dismissing the revolutionary potential of the anti-colonial movements, arguing that these movements "initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and perhaps play a much more revolutionary part than we expect," whilst the early Comintern lambasted Second International "orthodox" Marxism which "in reality only recognised the white race." This line of argument is also found in the claim by James P. Cannon, the key figure in the early American Trotskyist movement, that "Lenin and the Bolsheviks were distinguished from all other revolutionary tendencies by their concern for the problems of oppressed nations and national minorities, and affirmative support of their struggles for freedom, independence and self-determination." From this perspective, there is no genuine socialist approach to the national question outside of the Leninist tradition, for in practice, the other socialists are at best, only nominally committed to national emancipation, and, at worst, actively pander to national chauvinism. It is thus perfectly appropriate, from this perspective, that debates on socialist approaches to the national question are conducted within the Leninist tradition alone.

 

The other socialist tradition: anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism

In the remainder of this paper, I will examine the other socialist tradition - anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism - and in doing so, develop two main arguments: firstly, I will provide an analysis of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist approaches to national and racial oppression in the "glorious period" of the movement, demonstrating the vacuity of the claim that Leninism was the first socialist tradition to develop a positive and revolutionary response to these issues; secondly, I will demonstrate the applicability of this point to South Africa as well, demonstrating not only that the pre-CPSA socialist groupings were primarily revolutionary syndicalist in character, but also that these organisations developed a consistent and revolutionary approach to the national question, thereby refuting the teleological conception of South African socialist history as well as the notion that Leninism and Marxism are the sole fount of a progressive position on the national question.

In closing, I will demonstrate that the roots of the notion that the pre-CPSA groupings failed to progressively grapple with the national question lie in the "Communist school" of South African socialist history, which is, to a large extent, premised on inadequate and even falsified research. I will also show how later researchers have tended to replicate the fundamental precepts of the "Communist school's" approach in their writings. In short, the remaining sections of the paper will contest two basic flaws in much of the literature on socialism and the national question: first, the general tendency to conflate the history of revolutionary socialism with the history of State-centred forms of socialism, and, specifically, the history of Marxism; second, the simplistic and, in cases, caricatured portrayal of the positions of non-Marxist revolutionary socialists, such as the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists.

         

Anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism and national and racial oppression, 1864-1936

In Leninist discourse, anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism are often caricatured as forms of "left-economism" that are entirely oblivious to political and social issues. This is reflected in the South African debates over political strategy and the role of the trade unions in the anti-apartheid movement, where the non-racial independent trade unions – the "workerists" associated with the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) – were labelled "syndicalist" and "economistic" by ANC and SACP supporters for their refusal to align with particular political parties and coalitions. Oddly enough, this analysis has its echo in the standard histories of anarchism by Joll, Kedward, Marshall, Nettlau and Woodcock – Guerin’s work is an important exception – all of which simply fail to provide any consistent analysis or discussion of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist positions on national oppression and racial discrimination.

It is my contention, on the contrary, that although the international anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movement often lacked an organisational centre in the form of a sustained international organisation that could codify and enforce particular understandings on social questions, it adhered to a coherent, positive, principled, revolutionary and libertarian approach to issues of national oppression and racial discrimination. I will discuss this through a series of case studies, which will be followed by an abstraction of the principles underlying these struggles. At an immediate level, however, it should be noted that support for national liberation follows directly from anarchism’s opposition to hierarchical political structures and economic inequality, and advocacy of a freely constituted international stateless confederation of self-administrating communes and workers' associations.

Bakunin’s own political roots lay within the national liberation movements of Eastern Europe, and he retained a commitment to what would nowadays be called "decolonisation" throughout his life. When Bakunin moved from Slavic nationalism towards anarchism in the 1860s, following the disastrous 1863 Polish insurrection, he still argued in support of struggles for national self-determination. He doubted whether "imperialist Europe" could keep the colonial countries in bondage: " Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics asleep in their servitude will necessarily awaken and begin to move." Bakunin went on to declare his "strong sympathy for any national uprising against any form of oppression", stating that every people "has the right to be itself ... no one is entitled to impose its costume, its customs, its languages and its laws." He also declared that he regarded all human beings, of whatever race, as equal, arguing for the "recognition of human right and human dignity in every man, of whatever race [or] colour..," insisting that apparent racial differences were "solely the result of the social environment."

The crucial issue, however, "in what direction and to what end" will the national liberation movement move? For Bakunin, national liberation must be achieved "as much in the economic as in the political interests of the masses": if the anti- colonial struggle is carried out with "ambitious intent to set up a powerful State" or if "it is carried out without the people" and "must therefore depend for success on a privileged class," it will become a "retrogressive, disastrous, counter-revolutionary movement."

Every exclusively political revolution – be it in defence of national independence or for internal change' – that does not aim at the immediate and real political and economic emancipation of people will be a false revolution. Its objectives will be unattainable and its consequences reactionary.

Hence, if national liberation is to achieve more than simply the replacement of foreign oppressors by local oppressors, the national liberation movement must thus be merged with the revolutionary struggle of the working class and peasantry against both capitalism and the State. Without social revolutionary goals, national liberation will simply be a bourgeois revolution. This clearly implies the exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the national liberation movement, or the splitting of this movement into competing and hostile bourgeois and worker-peasant tendencies. A national liberation movement by and for the working class and peasantry requires that "All faith in any divine or human authority must be eradicated among the masses" and the rejection of bourgeois nationalism, called "patriotism" by Bakunin: "The bourgeoisie love their country only because, for them, the country, represented by the State, safeguards their economic, political and social privileges ' Patriots of the State, they become furious enemies of the mass of the people."

The national liberation struggle of the working class and peasantry must be resolutely anti-statist, for the State was necessarily the preserve of a privileged class, and the state system would continually recreate the problem of national oppression: "to exist, a state must become an invader of other states ' it must be ready to occupy a foreign country and hold millions of people in subjection." In short, for a national liberation struggle to realise the interests of the working class and peasantry it had to recognise the class war within the nation, and reject the notion that the State was the representative and instrument of the "nation". The national liberation struggle of oppressed nationalities must be internationalist in character as it must supplant obsessions with cultural difference with universal ideals of human freedom, it must align itself with the international class struggle for "political and economic emancipation from the yoke of the State" and the classes it represents, and it must take place, ultimately, as part of an international revolution: "a social revolution ' is by its very nature international in scope" and the oppressed nationalities "must therefore link their aspirations and forces with the aspirations and forces of all other countries." The "statist path involving the establishment of separate ' States" is "entirely ruinous for the great masses of the people" because it did not abolish class power but simply changed the nationality of the ruling class. Instead, the state system must be abolished and replaced with a coalition of workplace and community structures "directed from the bottom up ' according to the principles of free federation."

As such, Bakunin's conception of the national liberation struggle differs fundamentally from the Leninist approaches discussed above. Whereas both Stalinism and Trotskyism treat the national liberation struggle and the socialist struggle as separate, albeit interrelated, "stages" through which colonial countries must pass, Bakunin argues that national liberation can and should be fused social revolutionary struggle of the exploited classes into a single "stage". Whereas Stalinism and Trotskyism argue that national liberation has a universally "bourgeois-democratic" character, Bakunin insists that there are both bourgeois, on the one hand, and working class and peasant, on the other, agendas in the national liberation struggle that are fundamentally irreconcilable, and hence must assume the form of distinct and competing movements. Hence, national liberation must be differentiated from nationalism, which is the class programme of the bourgeoisie; it is hardly the task of revolutionaries to build classless national liberation fronts or anti-imperialist blocs. Bakunin also denies the linkage of "bourgeois" and "democratic" reforms posited within these Leninist models, as the bourgeoisie is characterised precisely by its opposition to general democratic reforms. Whereas both Stalinist and Trotskyist approaches assume that the national liberation struggle takes place within the borders of the nation state, and takes place through the national State, Bakunin disarticulates popular national liberation from the wielding of national state power, and advocates, instead, statelessness as the precondition for national self-determination. This difference reflects, in turn, the "political socialist" orientation of the Leninist currents, and the libertarian socialist character of Bakuninism.

A detailed history of anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist involvement in struggles against racial and national oppression must be left to another paper. For now, examples must suffice. Let us deal first with the reaction to imperialism of the anarchists within the dominant capitalist countries. Opposition to imperialism was a crucial part of anarchist anti-militarist campaigns, which stressed that colonial wars did not serve the interests of workers but rather the purposes of capital. The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in France, for example, devoted a considerable part of its press to exposing the role of French capitalists in North Africa. The first issue of La Bataille Syndicaliste, which appeared on the 27 April 1911, exposed the "Moroccan syndicate": the "veiled men" who dictated to the ministers and diplomats and sought a war that would boost demand for arms, lands, and rail and lead to the imposition of tax on the indigenous people. Another article in the same paper reported approvingly on Moroccan protests against Spanish provocations in the area.

In Spain, the "Tragic Week" began on Monday 26 July 1909 when the union, Solidarad Obrero, which was led by a committee of anarchists and socialists, called a general strike against the call-up of the mainly working class army reservists for the colonial war in Morocco. By Tuesday, workers were in control of Barcelona, the "fiery rose of anarchism," troop trains had been halted, trams overturned, communications cut and barricades erected. By Thursday, fighting broke out with government forces, and over 150 workers were killed in the street fighting. The significance of the Tragic Week was precisely that, as the Trotskyist Trewhela notes, "the proletariat in Europe rebelled and shed its blood against imperialism in Africa." Kedward argues that the reservists were embittered by disastrous previous colonial campaigns in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, but whilst this comment is true, it misses the political significance of the Tragic Week as an anti-imperialist uprising situated within a long tradition of anarchist anti-imperialism in Spain. The "refusal of the Catalonian reservists to serve in the war against the Riff mountaineers of Morocco," "one of the most significant" events of modern times, reflected the common perception that the war was fought purely in the interests of the Riff mine-owners, and that conscription was "a deliberate act of class warfare and exploitation from the centre."

One cannot, of course, accept Trewhela’s view that the Tragic Week of 1909 as the "the one occasion ' the only one" where European workers died in a rising against imperialism. In 1911, the newly founded, anarcho-syndicalist, National Confederation of Labour (CNT), successor to Solidarad Obrero, marked its birth with a general strike on the 16 September in support of two demands: defence of the strikers at Bilbao and opposition to the war in Morocco. Again, in 1922, following a disastrous battle against the forces of Abd el-Krim in Morocco in August, a battle in which at least 10,000 Spanish troops died, "the Spanish people were full of indignation and demanded not only an end to the war but also that those responsible for the massacre and the politicians who favoured the operation in Africa be brought to trial", expressing their anger in riots, and in strikes in the industrial regions.

In the Cuban colonial war (1895-1904), the Cuban anarchists and their unions joined the separatist armed forces, and made propaganda amongst the Spanish troops. The Spanish anarchists, likewise, campaigned against the Cuban war amongst peasants, workers, and soldiers in their own country. "All Spanish anarchists disapproved of the war and called on workers to disobey military authority and refuse to fight in Cuba," leading to several mutinies amongst draftees. Opposing bourgeois nationalism and statism, the anarchists sought to give the colonial revolt a social revolutionary character. At its 1892 congress in Cuba, the anarchist Workers' Alliance recommended that the Cuban working class join the ranks of "revolutionary socialism" and take the path of independence, noting that "...it would be absurd for one who aspires to individual freedom to oppose the collective freedom of the people..." When the anarchist Michele Angiolillo assassinated the Spanish President Canovas in 1897 he declared that his act both in revenge for the repression of anarchists in Spain and retribution for Spain’s atrocities in its colonial wars.

In Italy in the 1880s and 1890s "anarchists and former anarchists" "were some of the most outspoken opponents of Italian military adventures in Eritrea and Abyssinia." The Italian anarchist movement followed these struggles with a significant anti-militarist campaign in the early twentieth century, which soon focussed on the Italian invasion of Libya on 19 September 1911. Augusto Masetti, an anarchist soldier who shot a colonel addressing troops departing for Libya whilst shouting "Down with the War! Long Live Anarchy!" became a popular symbol of the campaign; a special issue of the anarchist journal L'Agitatore supporting his action, and proclaiming, "Anarchist revolt shines through the violence of war," led to a roundup of anarchists. Whilst the majority of Socialist Party deputies voted for annexation, the anarchists helped organise demonstrations against the war and a partial general strike and "tried to prevent troop trains leaving the Marches and Liguria for their embarkation points."

The campaign was immensely popular amongst the peasantry and working class and by 1914, the anarchist-dominated front of anti-militarist groups - open to all revolutionaries - had 20,000 members, and worked closely with the Socialist Youth. When Prime Minister Antonio Salandra sent troops against anarchist-led demonstrations against militarism, against special punishment battalions in the army, and for the release of Masetti on the 7 June 1914, he sparked off the "Red Week" of June 1914, a mass uprising ushered in by a general strike led by anarchists and the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI). Ancona was held by rebels for ten days, barricades went up in all the big cities, small towns in the Marches declared themselves self-governing communes, and everywhere the revolt took place "red flags were raised, churches attacked, railways torn up, villas sacked, taxes abolished and prices reduced." The movement collapsed after the Italian Socialist Party’s union wing called off the strike, but it took ten thousand troops to regain control of Ancona. After Italy entered the First World War in May 1915, the USI and the anarchists maintained a consistently anti-war, anti-imperialist position, continuing into 1920, when they launched a mass campaign against the Italian invasion of Albania and against imperialist intervention against the Russian Revolution.

"Syndicalist movements," an authoritative recent survey of research on revolutionary syndicalism notes, "probably belonged to those parts of the international labour movement which were the least sensitive to racism." Revolutionary syndicalism traditionally stressed the need to organise the unskilled and excluded millions of workers ignored and maligned by the craft unions, and to break down racial divisions within the world's working class. From its inception in the United States in 1905, the IWW castigated the American Federation of Labour for discrimination against people of colour, immigrants, and women. It actively organised Asian, black, Hispanic and foreign-born workers, rejected racist immigration restriction laws, and opposed racial discrimination, prejudice and violence, and retains the distinction of being the "only federation in the history of the American labour movement never to charter a single segregated local," maintaining "solidarity and equality regardless of race or colour such as most labour organisations have yet to equal". The IWW united workers across colour lines in the segregated southern States and docklands, and "from the very first ' maintained a definite stand against any kind of discrimination based on race, colour or nationality". In Australia, too, the IWW promoted for "the first time in the labour movement ... a coherent anti-racist view point". The IWW attacked the "White Australia Policy" of the ruling Labour Party as well as other expressions of White chauvinism, and set out to organise all workers – immigrants and Asians included – into "One Big Union" against capitalism.

At a time when the "orthodox" Marxism of the Second International insisted that underdeveloped countries were not ripe for revolution, the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists organised "third world" workers and peasants against national and racial domination. In addition to its role in the anti-colonial struggle, the anarchist-led Cuban labour movement played a central role in overcoming divisions between black, white Cuban, and Spanish-born workers. The Cuban anarchists "successfully incorporated many nonwhites into the labour movement, and mixed Cubans and Spaniards in it", "fostering class consciousness and helping to eradicate the cleavages of race and ethnicity among workers." The Workers Alliance "eroded racial barriers as no union had done before in Cuba" in its efforts to mobilise the "whole popular sector to sustain strikes and demonstrations." Not only did blacks join the union in "significant numbers," but the union also undertook a fight against racial discrimination in the workplace. The first strike of 1889, for example, included the demand that "individuals of the coloured race able to work there." This demand reappeared in subsequent years, as did the demand that blacks and whites have the right to "sit in the same cafes," raised at the 1890 May Day rally in Havana. The anarchist periodical El Producter, founded in 1887, denounced "discrimination against Afro-Cubans by employers, shop owners and the administration specifically." And through campaigns and strikes involving the "mass mobilisation of people of diverse race and ethnicity," anarchist labour in Cuba was able to eliminate "most of the residual methods of disciplining labour from the slavery era" such as "racial discrimination against non-whites and the physical punishment of apprentices and dependientes."

In Mexico, anarchists led Indian peasant risings such as the revolts of Chavez Lopez in 1869 and Francisco Zalacosta in the 1870s. In its later incarnations, such as the Mexican Liberal Party, the revolutionary syndicalist "House of the Workers of the World" (COM) and a local IWW, Mexican anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism continually challenged the political and economic dominance of the United States, and opposed racial discrimination against Mexican workers in foreign-owned enterprises, as well as within the United States. In the 1910s, the local IWW’s focus on "’bread and butter’ issues combined with the promise of future workers’ control struck a responsive chord among workers caught up in a nationalist revolution that sought to regain control from foreigners the nation’s natural resources, productive systems and economic infrastructure".

In Nicaragua, Augustino Cesar Sandino (1895-1934), the leader of the Nicaraguan guerrilla war against the United States’ occupation between 1927-33, remains a national icon. Sandino’s army’s "red and black flag had an anarcho-syndicalist origin, having been introduced into Mexico by Spanish immigrants." His own eclectic politics were framed by a "peculiar brand of anarcho-communism," a "radical anarchist communism" "assimilated ' in Mexico during the Mexican revolution" where he received "a political education in syndicalist ideology, also known as anarchosyndicalism, libertarian socialism, or rational communism."

In Ireland, to cite another case, the revolutionary syndicalists James Connolly and Jim Larkin sought to unite workers across sectarian religious divides in the 1910s, aiming at transforming the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, which they led, into a revolutionary "One Big Union." Socialism was to be brought about through a revolutionary general strike: "they who are building up industrial organisations for the practical purposes of to-day are at the same time preparing the framework of the society of the future ' the principle of democratic control will operate through the workers correctly organised in ' Industrial Unions, and the ' the political, territorial state of capitalist society will have no place or function'"

A firm anti-imperialist, Connolly opposed the nationalist dictum that "labour must wait," and that independent Ireland must be capitalist: what would be the difference in practice, he wrote, if the unemployed were rounded up for the "to the tune of ‘St. Patrick’s Day’" whilst the bailiffs wore wear "green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the road will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic"? In the end, he insisted, "the Irish question is a social question, the whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself, in the final analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland." Connolly was sceptical of the very ability of the national bourgeoisie to consistently fight against imperialism, writing it off as a sentimental, cowardly, and anti-labour bloc, and he opposed any alliance with this layer: the once-radical middle class have "bowed the knee to Baal, and have a thousand economic strings - binding them to English capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them toward Irish patriotism," and so, "only the Irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland." Connolly was executed in 1916 following his involvement in the Easter Rising,which helped spark the Irish War of Independence of 1919-1922, one of the first successful secessions from the British Empire.

A final example bears mentioning. The anarchist movement emerged in East Asia in the early twentieth century, where it exerted a significant influence in China, Japan and Korea. With the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, opposition to the occupation developed in both Japan and in Korea, and spilled over into China. In Japan, the prominent anarchist Kotoku Shusui was framed and executed in July 1910, in part because his Commoner's Newspaper campaigned against Japanese expansionism.

For the Korean anarchists, the struggle for decolonisation assumed centre-stage in their political activity: they played a prominent part in the 1919 rising against Japanese occupation, and in 1924 formed the Korean Anarchist Federation on the basis of the "Korean Revolution Manifesto" which stated that "we declare that the burglar politics of Japan is the enemy for our nation's existence and that it is our proper right to overthrow the imperialist Japan by a revolutionary means". The Manifesto made it clear that the solution to this national question was not the creation of a "sovereign national State" but in a social revolution by the peasants and the poor against both the colonial government and the local bourgeoisie. Further, the struggle was seen in internationalist terms by the Korean Anarchist Federation, which went on to found an Eastern Anarchist Federation in 1928, spanning China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam and other countries, and which called upon "the proletariat of the world, especially the eastern colonies" to unite against "international capitalistic imperialism".

Within Korea itself, the anarchists organised an underground network, the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation, to engage in guerrilla activity, propaganda work and trade union organising. In 1929, the Korean anarchists founded an armed liberated zone, the Korean People's Association in Manchuria, which brought together two million guerrillas and Korean peasants on the basis of voluntary farming co-operatives. The Korean People's Association in Manchuria was able to withstand several years of attacks by Japanese forces and Korean Stalinists backed by the Soviet Union before being forced underground. Resistance continued throughout the 1930s despite intense repression, and a number of joint Sino-Korean operations were organised after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

         

The revolutionary syndicalists and South Africa's national question, 1910-1921

In short, the material above demonstrates that there was an alternative socialist approach to the national question to that developed within the Leninist tradition, and that this approach, indeed, preceded the formalised positions of the Comintern by, in some cases, half a century.

What, then, of South Africa, and, in particular, of the left in pre-CPSA South Africa? As noted above, the dominant interpretation of early socialist history in South Africa remains that developed by the "Communist school", an approach posits that the pre-CPSA left was at once largely Marxist in orientation and incapable of properly answering the national question. Both of these contentions are, however, inaccurate. For, as I have argued elsewhere, the notion that the pre-1921 socialists were generally Marxists is a flawed one. The key socialist groups in the first two decades of the twentieth century were strongly influenced by anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, and, in particular, by the model of the IWW. Thus, the formation of the CPSA in 1921 represents a deep-seated break in socialist thought in South Africa. Rather than the logical culmination of hard labour by the "true socialists" grasping for the light of Leninist doctrine, the formation of the CPSA represented a formal about-face between 1920 and 1921 as the various socialist groups sought to revise their views rapidly in order to secure membership of the Comintern on the basis of the "21 points" of Leninism. (This is not to deny that revolutionary syndicalist influences remained within the early CPSA, as suggested above: however, the formal programme and orientation of the local socialist movement had undoubtedly shifted.)

The pre-1909 socialist organisations tended to be highly eclectic, but included a strong libertarian socialist component. The Social Democratic Federation, the first twentieth-century socialist group in South Africa, was founded in Cape Town in 1904. Its founder and key figure, the controversial Wilfrid Harrison - also founder of the short-lived Pretoria Socialist Society in 1911, as well as the first secretary of the CPSA - was a self-described "Philosophical Anarchist" who addressed crowds in Cape Town on the merits of Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. Within the ranks of this broad left organisation were to be found Marxists but also "anarchists, reform socialists, guild socialists". Harrison was also the founder of the short-lived Pretoria Socialist Society in 1911, and later became the first secretary of the CPSA. The Social Democratic Federation remained a loose propaganda group, based in Cape Town, until its absorption into the CPSA in 1921.

The Voice of Labour, South Africa's first socialist weekly, founded in 1908 in Johannesburg, provided a forum for a range of socialist currents to air their views. These included anarchists, such as Henry Glasse, an Englishman who had settled in Port Elizabeth in the 1880s. The translator of Kropotkin’s The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution and Expropriation into English, Glasse must be considered the pioneer of libertarian socialism in South Africa. Working in apparent isolation, Glasse continued to contribute to Kropotkin’s Freedom in London, gave public lectures on anarchist ideas, and authored several anarchist pamphlets, such as Socialism: the remedy in 1901, and The Superstition of Government in 1902.

From 1910, the views expressed in the Voice of Labour were overwhelmingly those of IWW-style revolutionary syndicalism. This growing interest was at least partly attributable to the interest sparked by the tour of South Africa by the English revolutionary syndicalist Tom Mann between February and April 1910. Mann, who visited Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria, spent his time preaching the "gospel ' of a complete change of society" and the "perfected system industrial organisation to make this possible", urging at all times "the need for economic organisation, and an amalgamation of the unions on the basis of industrial unionism."

It was from amongst the network of socialists associated with the Voice of Labour that the first two revolutionary syndicalist organisations were established in South Africa in 1910. These were the IWW (South African section) founded in June 1910 through the take-over of a smaller "Industrial Workers Union" orientated to unskilled whites, and the Socialist Labour Party, founded circa March 1910, and not to be confused with the South African Labour Party; each of these two groups was aligned to a competing faction of the international IWW movement. Key activists in the local IWW included Andrew Dunbar and Tom Glynn, whilst adherents of the Socialist Labour Party included Ralph Rabb, I. Israelstam, Jock Campbell, John Campbell (no relation), J.M. Gibson, C.B. Tyler, W. Reid and Philip R. Roux (father of communist Eddie Roux, discussed earlier).

Whilst the local Socialist Labour Party was successful in building a cadre of eloquent proponents of its views, its activities remained largely propagandistic in nature, centred on paper sales and talks on Sundays in the Market Square in Johannesburg, and internal education work. The local IWW also held regular open-air Sunday meetings at the Market Square in Johannesburg, but was rather more successful in moving beyond simply propagating the need for "One Big Union". In 1911, the IWW organised two spectacular strikes by Johannesburg tramway workers; it also held meetings Pretoria amongst railway workers, and attracted "some of the Railway Servants Association" to its "Pretoria Local" the same year, a prospect which doubtless alarmed government officials who worried about the impact of IWW methods on the state railways.

Although both organisations were apparently defunct by 1914, all of the prominent revolutionary syndicalists of the pre-war period – with the exception of Tom Glynn (who had left for Australia to edit the IWW paper Direct Action) and Jock Campbell (who announced his retirement from political life at the first annual conference of the ISL in January 1916) – joined with an anti-war group of socialist dissidents from the South African Labour Party to form the ISL in September 1915. These dissidents included W.H. Andrews, S.P. Bunting and David Ivon Jones. Although the ISL is typically presented in the literature as the "first Marxist orientated political organisation in the history of the South African labour movement", led by "revolutionary Marxists", preoccupied with "the teachings of Karl Marx", "applying Marxism to South Africa", and acting as "tireless propagandists" for Marxist ideology, the organisation was, in fact, deeply influenced by the revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW, resolving at its first congress in January 1916:

That we encourage the organisation of the workers on industrial or class lines, irrespective of race, colour or creed, as the most effective means of providing the necessary force for the emancipation of the workers.

"The key to social regeneration ' to the new Socialist Commonwealth," argued the organisation’s weekly journal, the International, "is to be found in the organisation of a class conscious proletariat within the Industrial Union." The aim was "the union of all workers along the lines of industry; not only as a force behind their political demands, but [also] as the embryo of that Socialist Commonwealth which ... must take the place of the present barbaric order."

Rather than being run by capitalists, or "dominated by a paternal bureaucracy", the economy had to be "administered ' democratically by the workers themselves ' along the lines of their particular industry." The socialist commonwealth would have "no room for government, as only slaves require to be kept in subjection; no room for laws, as no restriction will be required in a society of social equals; no soldiers or policemen, who are only required to enforce class made rules."

The International Socialist League was contemptuous of the white craft unions: their "craft scabbery" meant they failed to even organise solidarity between white strikers of different crafts and, equally seriously, they were guilty of "complete oblivion to the sufferings of the lower paid [and] unemployed white workers, mainly women" and an "intolerant" attitude "towards the native wage slave." What was required was a "new movement" that would "recognise no bounds of craft, no exclusions of colour." Hence, whilst the ISL was the key mover in the founding of the CPSA, there was a radical political discontinuity between the two organisations, reflecting a dramatic shift in the formal political orientation of the ISL from revolutionary syndicalism towards Leninism in the period between 1920 and 1921.

In May 1918, the Social Democratic Federation, which maintained cordial ties with the ISL, split when a group of younger militants, including A.Z. Berman, Manuel Lopes and Joe Pick, left to form the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL). Apparently they felt that the Social Democratic Federation was "too academic and not sufficiently in touch with the immediate ravages of industry, nor sufficiently in the vicinity of the proletariat." The new organisation rented a hall in Ayre Street, District Six the central residential area of the Coloured community - that was capable of seating seated 600 people. The elderly Henry Glasse also wrote as a correspondent for the IndSL's journal, the Bolshevik, which appeared from early 1919. Notwithstanding its name, Bolshevik promoted an even more orthodox revolutionary syndicalism than the International. Whereas the ISL - like the old Socialist Labour Party - was willing to countenance participation in the electoral process, the IndSL followed the line of the defunct local IWW that electoralism was a positive danger to the working class movement:

The interests of the Working Class and of the Employing Class are diametrically opposed. There can be no peace as long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people, and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the all the toilers come together on the industrial field, and take and hold what they produce by their labour, through an economic organisation of the working class, without affiliation to any political party.

The objects of the organisation were described in the statement as "The abolition of the wage system and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth based on the principle of self-governing industries, in which the workers will work and control the instruments of production, distribution and exchange for the benefit of the entire community." Its aims were the propagation "by every means in our power" of "the principles of Industrial Unionism" and "advising and assisting the working class in the establishment of such forms of industrial organisation as will enable them not only to improve their present condition but eventually take over complete control of all industries."

         

The left - before the CPSA

If there were "true socialists" in South Africa before the CPSA, then, they were by no means Marxists, and they were even less so a hardy group of "tireless" Leninists-in-the-making. What then of the positions adopted by these pre-CPSA groupings vis-à-vis the national question in South Africa? This section of the paper will demonstrate that the pre-CPSA revolutionary left, as represented by organisations such as the South Africa section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the International Socialist League (ISL), the Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), and the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), argued for a fusion of the struggle against national oppression and the struggle against capitalism and the capitalist State through a revolutionary, non-racial, "One Big Union" that would overcome the racial divisions within the working class, forcibly remove racial laws, and also seize, and place under working class control, the means of production. This line of argument situates the South African revolutionary syndicalists of the 1910s squarely in line with the general anti-racist orientation of the international revolutionary syndicalist movement. This section will also develop a critique of the manner in which the arguments of the "Communist school" that the early left ignored, or even endorsed, national oppression in South Africa, are premised on a misrepresentation of the historical record which is fundamentally incorrect and based on, at best, a misunderstanding and inadequate research on the pre-CPSA period, and, at worst, deliberate falsification.

The Social Democratic Federation, as a broad left group, lacked clear, shared positions on the national question in South Africa. The organisation also tended to follow the abstract and propagandising approach to socialist work favoured by the lucid Harrison, who saw gradualist educational work as the key task of socialists, and criticised the focus of the local IWW on union work as amounting to education "in name only". Indeed, Harrison even suggested on occasion that people of all classes could be convinced of the rationality of socialism. Thus, the main activity of the Social Democratic Federation was propaganda work, much of it in the form of public talks in District Six, the poor white area of Salt River, and at the foot of the Jan van Riebeeck statue, a popular site for street speakers. The Social Democratic Federation had a general, if somewhat abstract, anti-racist politics – its public meetings were conducted in several languages to racially mixed crowds, its relations with the Coloured nationalist African Political Organisation were cordial, and its members regularly sought to have colour bar clauses deleted from trade union constitutions - but there is little to suggest a coherent and programmatic approach to the national question in South Africa.

A rather more comprehensive approach can be found in the writings of the revolutionary syndicalists associated with the Voice of Labour. Despite the sectarianism that dogged relations between the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party, both parties shared agreed key point of agreement between the two revolutionary syndicalist organisations, and that was their opposition to racism in the labour movement.

The Voice of Labour was an eclectic paper. Whilst the founder and first editor of the paper, Archie Crawford, opposed the racism endemic in the white labour movement, a few correspondents were less sanguine. In a heated debate on the "colour question," some correspondents denied the admissibility of blacks to socialist organisations, the franchise, and the "Socialist State". Upbraided by Crawford, they also came under fire from the paper’s anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist correspondents, who strenuously opposed these ideas as anti-working class.

Glasse, who called on the paper to give preference to "direct action ' over ' Parliamentary politics" – which acts to "chill and paralyse natural energy and initiative" praised the paper for its editorial position "in regard to the native and coloured question", arguing that race issues were used to divide workers in the interests of the capitalists: "For a white worker in this South Africa to pretend he can successfully fight his battle independent of the coloured wage slaves - the vast majority - is, to my mind, simply idiocy".

"Proletarian", the revolutionary syndicalist editor of the Voice of Labour who took over from Crawford from late 1910 to early 1912, argued that it was inevitable that the African workers had begun to organise for "mutual protection". Unlike the white craft unionists, "the hitherto unorganised natives" had won "a couple of strikes", precisely because they had, unlike the white craft unionists, "the commonsense to practice working class solidarity". In his view, "Sooner or later they will revolt against wage slavery." In such a situation, the "only logical thing for white slaves to do is to throw in their lot with the black wage slave in a common assault on the capitalist system." "Proletarian" stressed the common interests of both sets of workers: "if the natives are crushed the whites will go down with them", the "stress of industrial competition" compelling the minority of white workers to "accept the same conditions of labour as their black brethren."

On this note, "Proletarian" opposed the introduction of compulsory military service in South Africa in the form of the Defence Bill, which was applicable to whites only, on the grounds that workers should not take up arms against one another. The real point of this "militarist" Bill was to suppress a "native rising". But such a rising was "wholly justified" given the "the cruel exploitation of South African natives by farmers, mining magnates and factory owners." Hence, it should receive the "sympathy and support of every white wage-slave": "no white wage slave will be true to the cause of labour if he lifts a rifle against his black brother." Workers should stand together, and, "if you must fight see that your rifles are aimed at the class which owns all property and robs all races." "Proletarian" went on to condemn the "grotesque" "attitude of superiority" of the "'aristocrats' of labour" to the coloured races.

What did this mean in practical terms? Both the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party advocated the organisation of non-racial revolutionary industrial unions. Jock Campbell of the Socialist Labour Party, an Irishman from the Clydeside in Scotland, has the distinction of being described in the literature as the "first socialist to make propaganda amongst the African workers", advocating "unity among all wage slaves, regardless of colour". Such contacts are likely to have taken place at socialist meetings in the Market Square.

When first incarnated as the Industrial Workers Union, the IWW described itself as a "class-conscious revolutionary organisation embracing all workers regardless of craft, race or colour". As the IWW proper, it sought to "fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black." Glynn retained this outlook after he left for Australia, becoming one of the most vocal advocates of the IWW’s case against the "White Australia" policy through Direct Action and public meetings. The local IWW was the only union in pre-1914 South Africa that placed absolutely no racial restrictions on membership. Indeed, not only was it the only union in the period without a colour bar, but it was the first labour union in South African history open to workers of all races. Indeed, it appears to have been the first truly non-racial labour union in the whole of Britain's African empire.

The anti-racism of the local anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists was thus in line with the movement’s opposition to racial and national oppression worldwide. A resolute non-racialism was one of the distinctive contributions of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism to local socialist political culture. The notion of integrated, revolutionary industrial unions developed by the local IWW and Socialist Labour Party would later become the central pillar of ISL and IndSL politics.

A further position developed by these libertarian pioneers, and adopted by their successors, was a strong opposition to black nationalism, characterised as an anti-working class vehicle for the petty bourgeoisie. "Proletarian" was critical of the "small capitalist" nationalists, such as Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, leader from 1905 onwards of the African Political Organisation, which was based amongst the Coloured community. "Proletarian" was scathing towards Abdurahman for his vocal opposition to socialist ideas. It was ironic, noted "Proletarian," that whilst Abdurahman opposed socialism, he was willing to lobby, and work with, the local "Dutch farmers". This was "notwithstanding the fact, of which he is fully aware" that this class was "responsible for the notorious Masters and Servants Act" of 1911, which criminalized strike action and desertion by workers, and was used to suppress unionisation amongst African and Coloured workers. Racial divisions needed to be overcome through working class solidarity, "an organisation of wage-workers, black and white, male and female, young and old" which would proclaim "a universal general strike preparatory to seizing and running the interests of South Africa, for the benefit of workers to the exclusion of parasites."

The material, then, demonstrates that local IWW and Socialist Labour Party were pioneers of anti-racist, integrated, trade unionism in South Africa. It is thus ironic that the I.W.W. has been castigated in the literature for ignoring the national question. The Simons make the blanket assertion that all the socialists associated with the Voice of Labour either ignored the national question or pandered to white chauvinism. However, they fail to provide any discussion at all of the IWW and Socialist Labour Party’s positions, but instead rely on insinuating that these organisations shared the views of the small number of racist correspondents who wrote on occasion to the Voice of Labour. As such, they simply ignore the anarchists’ and revolutionary syndicalists’ fierce polemics against these correspondents, and provide a completely misleading picture of the situation. The materials I have presented demonstrate the dishonesty of the Simons’ characterisation, and suggest that their conclusions can at best be described as the result of sloppy research, at worst, as the deliberate conflation of radically different positions.

It is, however, a sad testament to the hegemonic position of the Simons’s analysis – and, hence, of the "Communist school’s" views – that their vacuous analysis is taken at face value, and uncritically reproduced, in other discussions of the local IWW. Katz takes the Simons’ assertions at face value, and makes them a central plank of her critique of the local IWW. Katz adds the assertion that the IWW was opposed to the use of African policemen against white strikers during its 1911 actions on the tramways. Van Duin, drawing on the Simons and on Katz, leaps to the conclusion that the local IWW was influenced by a "European superiority-complex" according to which white workers were driven by "categorical imperative for status inequality". Even van der Linden’s authoritative survey of revolutionary syndicalism does not escape the Simons’ legacy: referring to van Duin, he singles out the local IWW as a possible exception to the general anti-racist record of revolutionary syndicalism.

There is, however, no basis for these characterisations of the local IWW. Even the claim that the local IWW complained about the use of African policemen is without foundation, as a cursory examination of the IWW statement in which this alleged complaint appears reveals. The article, carried in the Voice of Labour, merely mentions in passing that African assistants were used in the crackdown, but makes no complaints at all about the presence of African policemen per se. Instead, it focuses on exposing the police as a whole as an instrument of capitalist violence that, in its clash with IWW strikers, had attacked women and old men, and trampled anyone who got in its way. In short, the criticisms of the IWW’s positions on the national question, initiated by the Simons, and refracted through Katz, van Duin, and van der Linden, must be rejected out of hand. The split between the "white labourite" tradition represented by the South African Labour Party, and the anti-racist socialism of the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists, did not begin with the split in the former which led to the formation of the ISL: it had already taken place by 1910, with the emergence of a revolutionary syndicalist tendency in the South African labour movement.

         

The International Socialist League and the National Question

The ISL was far larger and far better resourced than its predecessors, and developed a more in-depth and comprehensive analysis of the national question in South Africa. From the start, the ISL situated itself within the anti-racist tradition pioneered by the socialists associated with the Voice of Labour. The fourth issue of the International in 1915 stated unequivocally that

"an internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the native working-class is capable of claiming will be a sham. One of the justifications for our withdrawal from the Labour Party is that it gives us untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the Native. If the League deal resolutely in