Originally published in Inqaba Ya Basebenzi No.1 (January 1981)

by Richard Monroe

Last year a number of activists in Sactu published a pamphlet: The Workers’ Movement, Sactu, and the ANC – A Struggle for Marxist Policies. It explained their position in a political dispute within Sactu which the organisation’s leadership had refused to allow to be debated.

Inqaba agrees with the view-point in the pamphlet, but we think the political points in it need to be developed further, showing their full implications in practice not only for the trade unions and Sactu, but also for the ANC.

Recently, an article attacking the pamphlet has appeared in the African Communist. We are publishing here a reply to that article.

Regrettably, the writer in the African Communist quite wrongly supports the unconstitutional action taken against the Sactu activists, who were suspended from ANC membership without any hearing, and are still suspended more than a year later!

The writer in the African Communist says an amazing thing. He thinks that “we” should “not rest content with disciplinary action”, but should “try to understand the incorrect theory” in the pamphlet. In other words: “shoot first and ask questions afterwards”! That approach may be the hallmark of Stalinism, but it is totally foreign to the democracy of the workers’ movement.

A proper debate on the issues raised in the pamphlet, in the African Communist, and in the article published here would be very important in the ranks of Sactu and the ANC. Inqaba calls on the ANC National Executive to lift the suspensions imposed on the comrades in October 1979. There should also be an immediate end to undemocratic practices like excluding them from meetings – even public meetings! – of the ANC.

A central feature of the surging mass movement in our country in the 1970s has been the struggle for organisation at the point of production – in the factories, the docks, the mines, the farms – and, out of this, the rebirth of independent trade unions. As each forward thrust of the movement ebbs into a temporary lull, it reveals ever more factories organised, and a swelling membership of an increasing number of trade unions.

The growth of factory organisation and of the trade unions is spurred by the same fierce determination which marks the movement as a whole, in township, countryside and school. The extent to which open organisation has been built during the 1970s is an unprecedented historic achievement, reflecting favourable objective circumstances for the mass movement. At the same time, as yet only a tiny fraction of the African workers are organised in the workplace. The unions which have come into existence live, for the most part, on the edge of legality. The independent union movement as a whole as yet contains many divisions; national organisation is rudimentary. The huge strides that have been made are dwarfed by the tasks that lie ahead.

What is the role of the trade unions in the revolutionary struggle which is unfolding in South Africa? What is the role of revolutionaries in the trade unions? The answer to these questions is vital for the whole liberation movement.

In early 1979, Robert Petersen, then Editor of Workers’ Unity, the official journal of the South African Congress of Trade Unions, submitted a memorandum to the Sactu NEC as a contribution to the discussion of these questions. The NEC, making no response to this memorandum, dismissed the Editor from his post, and in subsequent months stifled all attempts to have these important issues debated in the ranks of Sactu. Comrade Petersen and some of those supporting the ideas of the memorandum were later unconstitutionally suspended from membership of the ANC.

Throughout this period, neither the Sactu nor the ANC leadership offered any political arguments for their actions. The Sactu leadership asserted only, without further explanation, that the Editor was “putting forward policies which were not those of Sactu”. However, nearly a year after these actions, a reply to the Editor’s memorandum has appeared – in the African Communist (2^nd Quarter 1980), official journal of the South African Communist Party. The reply is by an anonymous “Reader”.

All South African revolutionaries will be concerned to consider this article, titled “The Role of Trade Unions in the South African Revolution”, and to weigh its arguments against those of the memorandum, published in a pamphlet, The Workers Movement, Sactu, and the ANC. [abbreviated below as WM]. This is not a question of academic theorising. For, in the huge struggles that lie ahead, the penalties for mistaken policies can and will be devastating.

Capitalism

The struggles of the masses over the last decade expose ever more clearly the burdens heaped on the majority of the people. Starvation in the Bantustans, poverty wages, the lengthening queues of the unemployed, the degrading pass laws, prices which rise from day to day, slave education, homelessness, squalid amenities – these are the daily lot of the masses.

In the face of the mounting struggles, the rulers of society reveal, more and more starkly, their total inability to satisfy a single demand of the masses. At the same time, in the mass movement there is a growing determination to call no halt until the heavy load of oppression is lifted from the shoulders of all the people. This irreconcilable clash of forces is the essence of the impending revolutionary situation in South Africa.

What lies at the root of this conflict? As Marxism explains, the clash is not accidental. Revolution in society comes about because the existing order is acting as a brake on the development of society, and as this fact impresses itself of necessity in the experience of the masses.

At the root of the unfolding revolution in South Africa lies the bankruptcy of capitalism. For generations South African capitalism, dependent on a system of cheap labour, has held back the all-round development of society and confined the mass of the people to an existence of misery and humiliation. Today, as the capitalist system through the world moves once again into crisis, the capitalist class in South Africa can survive only by intensifying its control and exploitation of the people.

These basic realities were the departure point of Petersen’s memorandum, and are apparently accepted by the comrade writing in the African Communist:

the fundamental economic and political demands of the people cannot be achieved on the basis of the capitalist order in South Africa… national liberation can only be achieved on the basis of the destruction of the political and economic foundations of the apartheid system.

Bridges

Yet to merely state this in words is nothing more than a beginning. For Marxism, as for the mass movement, the critical questions are the practical means by which this struggle is carried through to its conclusion. It is here that our comrade in the African Communist falls into dangerous errors.

More and more, in the experience of mass struggle, the oppressed are discovering that there is not a single concrete need that can be fully satisfied without sweeping away, not simply the apartheid regime, but the capitalist class that shelters behind it. The bourgeoisie themselves, shivering in their boots, identify their basic struggle as the defence of ‘free enterprise’.

As Petersen’s memorandum explains, the task of revolutionaries is to clearly draw out this lesson; it is to strengthen and unify the movement by linking together all the struggles over day-to-day needs to the central tasks of the revolution.

Programme

How is this to be done? A vital aspect of this is the development of a programme of revolutionary demands – of demands, stemming from the daily needs of working people, which show the way forward to the revolution. For the revolution will come about precisely as the masses are united in determination to strike at the heart of the fetters which block the satisfaction of daily needs.

While the demands, of the trade unions are primarily economic, as Petersen’s memorandum points-out they are linked on every side to political issues. In every sphere of struggle – whether it is a question of wages, trade union rights, the pass laws or political rights – the same method of posing demands applies. In a section focussing on economic demands, the memorandum spells out this method very clearly:

How do we correctly link the workers’ economic demands to the revolution? This is an art which we can fully master only when we are actively involved in leading the actual struggles of the workers themselves. But there is one basic rule, which we have tried to follow in Workers’ Unity. This is to put forward demands which are supported by the workers as clearly right and reasonable, but which strike at the very root of apartheid and the capitalist system. They are demands, in other words, which cannot be conceded by our enemy – in some cases not at all, in others at least not on any permanent basis…

We have to bring out in practice – not merely through the demands, but through struggles organised round the demands – the total incapacity of the system in South Africa (or any reforms within that system) to provide a decent life for the working people.

Thus the revolutionary movement must put forward demands that:

clearly answer the needs of the people in their daily lives –  but cannot be secured in practice except through the overthrow of the apartheid regime and (because they come up against the barriers of the capitalist system) on the basis of the transition to socialism.

By organising and struggling on the basis of these demands, the mass of the workers will be drawn through experience towards revolutionary consciousness and action.

The comrade in the African Communist concedes the need for strengthening the self-confidence and power of the mass movement in day-to-day struggle:

The mobilisation of the masses and their success in winning concessions as the outcome of struggle is of fundamental importance in overcoming frustration and developing self-consciousness in the struggle.

The demands raised, he concedes also, must be linked with “the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the regime”. Yet he categorically rejects the organisation of struggle around a programme of demands “which cannot be met except as the outcome of a successful revolutionary transformation of the society.” To formulate demands in such a way, he argues, “is to guarantee that the struggle will fail to achieve them.”

This, comrade is a startling conclusion! The masses, you concede, need to overthrow capitalism in order to solve any fundamental problem. Yet to organise the mass struggle around a programme of their concrete demands which capitalism cannot meet is doomed to failure. The masses need to be rid of capitalism, yet cannot overthrow it!

What alternative does the comrade offer? In contrast to the position put forward by Petersen, this article in the African Communist does not put forward any concrete demands at all. The writer argues merely for the mobilisation of the mass struggle around what are vaguely called “specific demands” or “intermediate demands” – presumably demands which he believes can be met within the framework of South African capitalism. In this way, he claims, “frustration” is prevented by ensuring for the mass movement “success in winning concessions as the outcome of struggle.”

Indeed it is true that the mass struggles of the last decade in South Africa have achieved important if partial victories. But this in no way contradicts the fact that South African capitalism is bankrupt.

That these gains have been won reflects the strength of the mass movement – and each such gain further weakens the South African capitalist class. Revolutionaries in the mass movement fight alongside their fellow-workers in every struggle for every partial gain, striving to strengthen the fighting capacity of the movement.

No Lasting Basis

But the ruling class cannot in any way afford to permit such gains to survive on a lasting basis. It wrestles ever more desperately to dilute them and take back more than it has been forced to concede. Thus no illusion must be sown that these gains are anything more than partial, subject at the slightest weakening of the workers’ movement to reversal.

The comrade in the African Communist seems to reject this reality:

The idea that every gain won by the working class is merely absorbed by capital to its own advantage is an old one; it is an idea which totally underestimates the gains made in many spheres by the working class (political and trade union rights etc.) in different countries.

For a start, who is arguing that capital can “absorb” our demands “to its own advantage”? The point made in the memorandum is the opposite one – that the capitalists inevitably battle to claw back every concession which strikes at the root of their profits.

Concessions

Indeed the working class in many countries, through struggle, has wrested concessions from the capitalist class. In the boom after the Second World War, workers in the major capitalist countries secured substantial advances in standards of living and rights. Here, for a period, the capitalist class had room to manoeuvre.

Yet, inevitably, capitalist crisis has recurred and the capitalist class is launching an assault on every one of the gains that have been achieved. Increasingly, those right-wing leaders of social democracy who have preached the possibilities of continuous secure “gains” within the framework of capitalism incur the wrath of the workers.

Subject to reversal even in the major capitalist countries, the gains achieved through mass struggle under capitalism are infinitely more fragile in South Africa.

Must the inability of capitalism to make permanent concessions to the workers lead inevitably (as the African Communist’s “Reader” suggests would be the case) to demoralisation and passivity of the working class?

On the contrary. Over the last decade in our country the mass movement has, with the exertion of huge energies, won only partial gains. Some of these have already been taken back. Yet today the working class stands stronger and more confident than ever in South African history. In the face of the crisis of the capitalist class, its very frustration impels it not into passivity, but into an even more determined search for the way forward to the destruction of the regime and the overthrow of capitalism.

It is to develop a programme that builds the bridges towards that end that revolutionaries in the mass movement must direct their energies. For, as the crisis deepens, the gulf will grow more irreconcilable between what capitalism can afford and what the people need.

Can South African capitalism survive while paying a living wage to the whole of the working class? Can it survive without the pass laws? Can it survive while conceding the right to strike? Can South African capitalism guarantee jobs for all the people? The answer, revealed in its whole history, and revealed more starkly in the current crisis, is NO – a hundred times NO!

In this situation, to draw back towards raising only those demands which capitalism can afford will more and more tail behind the explosive forward movement of the workers themselves. In contrast to the practical development of a bold revolutionary programme, it is the attempt to confine the movement within these narrow limits which (far from ensuring success) would threaten it with “frustration” – and, ultimately, with “passivity”, “demoralisation”, and defeat.

Trade Unions

The comrade in the African Communist appears to believe that Comrade Petersen’s memorandum accords the leading role in the revolution to the trade union movement, and reduces the struggle to the struggle at the point of production. But this is not the position of the memorandum and indeed it would be a ludicrous position for any Marxist to argue. The memorandum deals, on the one hand, with the general nature and tasks of the revolution in South Africa and the corresponding tasks of the workers’ movement. On the other hand, it deals with the responsibilities of Sactu as a trade union organisation in relation to these general tasks.

The struggle against national oppression and capitalism in South Africa is in no way confined to the trade union struggle or the struggle at the point of production. At the same time, the struggle to build factory organisation and independent trade unionism is a vital part of the struggle as a whole. Within the trade union sphere, as in every other sphere of struggle, the task is to unify and strengthen the movement of the masses around a single revolutionary programme.

It is not for nothing that all around the world the building of the trade union movement in etched in blood in the history of the working class. For, under capitalism, the fight to combine at the point of production against the boss is a fight for the very survival of the workers. Friedrich Engels, the life-long comrade of Marx, summed-up this lesson of the workers’ movement in 1881:

If the isolated workman tries to drive his bargain with the capitalist, he is easily beaten and has to surrender at discretion; but if a whole trade of workmen form a powerful organisation, collect among themselves a fund to enable them to defy their employers if needs be, and thus become enabled to treat with those employers as a power, then, and only then, have they the chance to get even that pittance which according to the economical constitution of present society, may be called a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.

The Wages System

Just the fight for the means of survival itself represents, therefore, a challenge to the right of the capitalists to exact unlimited profits. But it is more than this. For, in building the trade unions, the working class – “defying” and “treating with the employers as a power” – constitutes itself as a collective force, and strengthens its organised confidence in its ability to overthrow capitalism.

The trade unions, the great teachers of Marxism have pointed out, are schools of the working class. As Engels pointed out in the same article, “the whole action of trade unions as now carried on, is not an end in itself, but a means, a very necessary and effective means, but only one of several means towards a higher end: the abolition of the wages system altogether.”

For all these reasons the capitalist class has, wherever possible, waged a relentless struggle to hold back the development of trade unions. The establishment of open legal trade unions, and the gains won by those trade unions, has been achieved only through the struggle of the workers. Where trade union rights have been secured, the capitalist class – no longer able simply to repress – supplements its tactics by trying to control, influence, bribe and corrupt the workers’ leaders. Thus it hopes to lull the workers’ movement, preparing to take back the gains that have been won. In Britain and the other major capitalist countries the gains in the trade union field, no less than elsewhere, are once again placed in jeopardy at the hands of a capitalist class in the throes of mounting economic crisis.

Thus the struggle to build strong and united trade unions is in no way separated, anywhere in the world, from the struggle to overthrow the capitalist class.

SA Trade Unions

The same need of South African capitalism for cheap labour, which has held back the all-round development of society, has resulted in a ruthless war by the ruling class against the creation of trade unions by the mass of the workers.

At various stages in our history, mass trade unionism has begun to blossom, only to be crushed: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in the 1920s, the Confederation of Non-European Trade Unions in the 1940s, Sactu in the 1950s. Today, out of the repression of the 1960s, independent trade unionism flourishes again on an unprecedented scale.

The sphere of legal trade unionism enlarges itself precariously, subject always to the retaliation of the apartheid regime and the bosses. Yet it is among the partial gains of the last decade, a historic achievement of the workers’ struggle.

To this day, the struggle for trade union freedom is met by the imprisonment, banishment, torture and murder of workers’ leaders and the harassment and victimisation of trade unionists in general. Yet, reflecting its own weakness, the ruling class cannot contain this movement by repression alone. It is forced to supplement its tactics with new means of control and division – attempts to take back by manoeuvres the gains that have been won.

The comrade in the African Communist not only misunderstands the tasks which Comrade Petersen identifies for Sactu. His vague and abstract phrases about the need to “differentiate [the trade union struggle] from and yet link it to the general political struggle” completely fail to offer any concrete way forward to developing and building on the gains that have been achieved in the last decade. The founding principles of Sactu remain the most developed expression of the tasks of trade unionism in South Africa, striking a strong echo in the class. In what way, comrade, do you propose that a mass trade union movement should be built in South Africa which can develop the founding principles into a material force?

If the demands within the trade union field are to be limited to “specific demands”, within the confines of what capitalism can afford, does this mean that trade unionism should be restricted to what is legally recognised by the South African regime? Should the open trade unions accept registration?

Petersen’s memorandum, in contrast, offers a method of work, in the trade union arena as elsewhere, which draws on the lessons of the 1970s and on those of the workers’ movement internationally.

Underground

In the present period the growth of open trade unions is gaining momentum, while at the same time is constantly under the threat of the sword. Increasingly the workers’ movement has learnt that the foundations of this trade unionism, like those of the mass movement as a whole, must be built underground.

From here, the expansion of the legal arena and the open organisational framework of the trade unions can be built, based on strong factory shop-floor committees. The organisational linking of these underground networks can proceed hand-in-hand with the forging of a unified programme of demands, centred on wages and conditions of work, but embracing all aspects of the workers’ life.

Through these means, the struggle for mass independent trade unionism, taking forward the founding principles of Sactu, can serve, in the words of Engels, as “a means, a very necessary and effective means, but only one of several means” towards the abolition of national oppression and capitalism.

Arming the Mass

The comrade in the African Communist counterposes the mass struggle, where in his view the task is the raising of (unspecified) “intermediate demands”, to the role of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which, he argues, stands alone in “direct and total opposition” to the state. But what is the reality?

Throughout its history, the South African ruling class has met the resistance of the masses with naked and unrestrained repression. Today, under the attempts to cloak its weakness in the rhetoric of “reform”, the ruling class intensifies that repression. Thus, more and more, even the most localised and partial struggle faces the threat of the full might of state power, and comes to stand “in direct and total opposition” to the state.

Against this threat, as Petersen’s memorandum pointed out, each local struggle increasingly poses the concrete need for organised and armed self-defence against the terror tactics of the state: for “armed defence, in favourable circumstances, of strikes, demonstrations, ‘squatter’ camps and schools; against police raids, pass arrests, forced removals and so forth.”

The violence wielded by the apartheid regime against the masses and against mass struggle will not be ended until the ruling capitalist class is itself removed from power. Since at least the 1950s, this reality has impressed itself on wider and wider layers of the masses. As Petersen says,

The most advanced and politically conscious layers of the working class have never counterposed armed struggle to mass struggle, as if they were different things. For them and for us, it is a question of the organisation, mobilisation and arming of the mass of the people, headed by the organised workers, towards the eventual armed insurrection and seizure of state power.

Apparently acknowledging the correctness of this view, the “Reader” in the African Communist nevertheless comments:

The question arises, however, of how and under what organisational form this self-defence is to be organised? In our movement it has been recognised that while the armed movement must be under the command of the political, nonetheless it requires its own, separate form of organisation.

Separate from what? “A Reader” does not deny that the task is to arm the mass of the people – and yet plainly argues that the armed cadre, instead of being under the discipline of the workers’ movement, must be organised separately from the organisations of the masses!

Such a separation can only weaken the masses, depriving them of the means for defending their daily struggles. At the same time the organisation of the armed cadre separately from and outside the mass movement serves to isolate that cadre itself, exposing it more easily to the retaliation of the state.

Organised separately from the mass combat with the ruling class, MK cannot in practice constitute a force standing “in direct and total opposition” to the state. Already there are many indications that the right wing of our movement seeks to use armed struggle not for the defence and advance of the mass struggle, but as a lever towards negotiations with the ruling class.

Outside the practical control of the organisations of mass struggle, MK could be misused in this way. Along the path of negotiations there lies no solution to the basic problems of the masses. To prepare the mass movement to carry through eventual mass armed insurrection, the cadres of MK must be integrated within the mass struggle.

The comrade in the African Communist regards Comrade Petersen’s arguments as “a particular economistic and ‘workerist’ approach”:

Implicit, and underlying the entire document, is the ‘workerist’ conception that the political struggle grows directly out of the immediate struggles at the point of production. For them, the wage struggle leads directly to the revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of apartheid and capitalism… The end result of the analysis … is … the abandonment of any conception of an alliance in the revolutionary struggle between the working class and the ‘rural poor’, together, under the appropriate conditions, with the petty bourgeoisie.

Lenin, in the early years of the century, criticised as “economistic” that tendency in the Russian labour movement which sought to limit the activity of the working class to the trade union field alone. This, Lenin pointed out, left the political sphere in the hands of other classes.

But this is not the position of Petersen’s memorandum. The memorandum does not seek, as “A Reader” suggests, to “reduce the complexities of the general revolutionary struggle to the trade union struggle”. Indeed, its position is the very opposite of this. Its entire thrust is to point at the need for strengthening the full range of political activity by the working class, within the trade union field as well as outside it.

The memorandum argues, not that the “wage struggle leads directly to the revolutionary struggle”, not that “the political struggle grows directly out of the struggle at the point of production”, but that neither the wage struggle itself (the struggle against poverty wages), nor any struggle at the point of production, can be resolved except through the over-throw of the apartheid regime and capitalism. This can be achieved only through the working class arising en masse to its full historical tasks, not only in the factory, but in every realm of society.

This position does not, as “A Reader” believes, neglect “the role of other classes”. It does not reduce the rural poor, or any of the oppressed, to “simple passive entities”.

The mass movement of the 1970s has embraced widely diverse sections of the oppressed, all engaged actively in struggle. Yet it is no accident that, against the intransigence of the regime, all other layers of society moving into action find it increasingly necessary to link-up with the movement of the workers – or be reduced to impotence.

Driving Force

For the black working class, over the last decade, has revealed itself as the driving force in the mass struggle. At the start of 1981 it stands bloodied but undefeated.

Although black workers and their families constitute the overwhelming majority of the people, the role they have assumed is not simply a result of numerical weight. The black workers, without any privilege or property, feel the full impact of every burden heaped on the masses. At the same time it is the workers, concentrated in the factories, the mines, the docks and the farms, who turn the wheels of production – and can bring those wheels grinding to a halt.

As Marxism explains, only the working class as a mass combines the consistent interest and the social power to carry the struggle for national liberation, democracy, and the abolition of capitalism to its conclusion – through the establishment of a workers’ democracy, and through initiating the building of socialism. It is for these reasons that the movement of the workers has the capacity to lead the struggle for the solution of the problems of all the oppressed.

It is the comrade in the African Communist, in reality, who wishes to limit the tasks of the working class. For him, the tasks of the working class are confined to the “immediate struggles at the point of production”. For him there are “structural conditions which tend to limit the horizons” of the workers in the trade unions. For him, it is impossible to conceive of mass struggle led by the working class around a programme of demands which capitalism cannot meet. For him, the workers’ movement is not to be entrusted with the organisation of its armed self-defence, which requires “separate organisation”.

“Other Classes”

Beyond these narrow boundaries, for “A Reader”, everything is “the role of other classes”. It is these arguments, and not those of Comrade Petersen’s memorandum, which are precisely the “economism” which Lenin criticised.

In the workplace, and outside the mass struggle will intensify in the coming period. The struggles of the 1970s and of 1980 are only a foretaste of what is to come. Their resolution, the comrade in the African Communist correctly points out, is a political task.

Already, in the struggles of the last decade, a workers’ leadership is taking shape in South Africa, as the vertebrae, sinews, and muscles of the living mass struggle as a whole. In this mass struggle of the oppressed, which will increasingly organise itself under the umbrella of the ANC, the working class must rise to the full tasks which lie before it: the overthrow of the apartheid regime and the capitalist class through mass armed insurrection. To achieve this goal, the active cadre of the workers’ movement must grow, digesting the lessons of the struggle in South Africa and internationally – by mastering and applying the real method of Marxism.

The debate around Sactu and the role of the trade unions can, by raising for discussion questions that are vital to the struggle, make an important contribution towards clarifying the tasks facing workers and youth in South Africa today.

© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2020).