SALEP’s Socialist Education Work – Why does the Labour Party NEC want to ban it?

May 1985

“The South African Labour Education Project has established itself with strong support from the Labour Movement in Britain to bring together the experience in lessons of Socialist Trade Unionism in Britain and in South Africa to assist in the struggles there.”

“I hope it is strongly supported in this country where we have a lot of experience that we could put at the disposal of the South African working class as well as giving strong political support to help them in their liberation struggle.”

Tony Benn, MP, and British Labour Party NEC member, 10 September 1982

“SALEP’s interpretation of events puts it completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa… Relations with the black and non-racial trade unions in South Africa would be put in jeopardy if the Party gave any encouragement to SALEP.”

British Labour Party National Executive Committee, 27 March 1985

Letter of Protest from Left-Wing Members of the British Labour Party NEC

As members of the Labour Party NEC, we wish to register our strong opposition to the NEC’s decision of 27 March to advise CLPs[1] and affiliates to give no assistance to, and have no contact with, the Southern African Labour Education Project.

This is an unprecedented attempt to police the decisions of CLPs and affiliates. Not only does it re-introduce the “proscribed lists” back into the Labour Party, it is an attempt to instruct CLPs and affiliates on how to conduct their solidarity with the liberation struggle in South Africa, and how to give assistance to socialist education in the South African workers’ movement.

We also protest strongly at the way in which the debate on this issue was handled on the International Committee and the NEC.

Firstly, neither the Labour Party Women’s Organisation nor the Labour Party Young Socialists (both of whom support SALEP) nor SALEP itself were given the opportunity to see or comment on the 21-page report prepared by the International Department.

Secondly, the decision was pushed through the International Committee and the NEC with totally inadequate debate. Those who raised questions about, or objection to, the arguments and conclusions of the report were cut short and silenced by curtailing the discussion. A request by one committee member to prepare an alternative report was refused.

At the very least, representatives of SALEP should have had the opportunity to present their case to the committees in person.

The Labour Party has the duty to support the democratic trade unions and the African National Congress in the struggle for liberation in South Africa. Without committing ourselves to every position that SALEP stands for, we believe that SALEP (which supports the democratic trade unions and the ANC) has made a contribution to socialist workers’ education in Southern Africa, and that support for it deserves the serious consideration of all British labour movement activists.

Tony Benn, Frances Curran, Eric Heffer, Joan Maynard, Jo Richardson, Dennis Skinner

28 May 1985

CONTENTS

Introduction

What Is SALEP And What Work Has It Done?

The NEC’s “Charges” Against SALEP’s Educational Work

The NEC’s “Political Charges” Against SALEP

The Struggle for Direct Links

SALEP and Direct Links: The NEC’s “Charges”

The NEC’s Other “Charges” Against SALEP

The Tasks for the Labour Party

Appendix: From the NATSOPA Journal and Graphic Review (October 1980)

Introduction

On 27 March 1985, the NEC of the British Labour Party resolved that: “Regions, CLPs and affiliates have no contacts with SALEP, do not use its materials or allow it facilities and publish an Advice Note outlining the NEC’s principal criticisms of SALEP.”

This decision was bulldozered through the International Committee and the NEC, with a minimum of discussion, despite the opposition of left-wingers.

The Southern African Labour Education Project is an education project undertaken by Southern African workers, youth, and socialists. It provides socialist education materials for the workers’ and youth movement in Southern Africa which are not being produced within the region itself, and assists in building and strengthening direct contacts between Southern African workers and the workers’ movement internationally.

Every Labour Party member and labour movement activist in Britain – let alone in Southern Africa – will be curious to know what possible justification there could be for taking such extreme bureaucratic measures – of proscription from the Labour Party – against educational work of this kind.

The Labour Party, which SALEP encourages all its co-workers in Britain to be actively involved in, should be in the forefront of assisting the South African workers’ movement in securing socialist education and building direct links.

An examination of what lies behind this decision reveals that the right-wing leaders who presently have a majority in the Labour Party NEC are engaging not merely in an unwarranted witchhunt against SALEP – but a frontal assault on the fundamental goals and aspirations of the growing revolutionary movement of the black oppressed in South Africa: goals and aspirations which SALEP, within the limits of its resources and objectives, has sought to reflect and encourage.

“Charges”

The NEC decision emerged out of a three-month “enquiry” into SALEP initiated by the International Committee, and the production of a 21-page report by the Labour Party International Department.

The report is an incredible tissue of falsifications and fabrications, which barely manages to string together two political ideas in a coherent way.

Its principal “charge” is that “SALEP’s interpretation of events puts it completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa.”

Incredible as it may seem, among the arguments used to support this “charge” are:

that “a central feature of SALEP’s approach is its heavy emphasis on wage levels in South Africa”;
that SALEP does not draw a rigid dividing line between trade union education and political education;
that SALEP stands for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter, the programme of the African National Congress;
that SALEP believes the struggle for democracy in South Africa cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism;

Labour movement activists in Britain, let alone in South Africa, will be astonished to learn that these positions are “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” – let alone that they constitute “crimes” for which the punishment should be bureaucratic quarantining and proscription from the British Labour Party.

In reality, as we will show, this so-called “spectrum” of “mainstream opinion” rules out the opinions of those in struggle in the factories, the townships, the schools, etc.; it rules out the opinions of the trade unions, the youth organisations, and those struggling within the country to build a mass United Democratic Front and a future mass African National Congress.

In fact this so-called “mainstream spectrum”, when examined, represents only those who oppose the full implementation of the Freedom Charter, refuse to struggle for democracy against the capitalist class as well as the apartheid regime, oppose the arming of the workers in South Africa – and are even unwilling to give too “heavy” an emphasis to the struggle against starvation wages.

This is a very narrow – and very right-wing – “spectrum” of opinion – both in the British and the South African labour movement!

The NEC report, amazingly, also is bitterly critical of the recent visit made by striking British miner Roy Jones to the South African NUM, the single largest democratic trade union in South Africa. This visit was an excellent example of what direct links can achieved, and was warmly welcomed by the many black workers and youth that Roy met, as well as by those in the British labour movement who have heard his report.

His visit had the historic consequence that the SA NUM made the first-ever donation by a democratic SA trade union to a union in an advanced capitalist country, and that Roy Jones was made the first white member of the South African NUM.

Direct links of this kind, claims the NEC report in a shameless lie, are not supported by the non-racial democratic trade unions inside South Africa and should not be encouraged!

Not content with such false and reactionary ‘political’ argument, the report engages in suppression and falsification of basic facts. Founders and co-workers of SALEP – including black workers and youth – have a record of political struggle, as ANC members and trade unionists, against the regime in South Africa. Some have endured banning, detention, and imprisonment. Those who compiled the report knew this full well. Yet the report paints a picture of the supporters of SALEP as solely “white intellectuals.”

It is scandalous enough that such reactionary and false arguments should be advanced and endorsed by leaders of the British Labour Party.

What is more disturbing still is that the NEC report claims the mantle of authority of the African National Congress and the South African Congress of Trade Unions.

Labour Party Conference policy, it states, calls for the NEC to “jointly determine the details of policy with representatives of the African National Congress [and] the South African Congress of Trade Unions… With this in mind, this paper was prepared upon the basis of discussions with the above organisations as well as a meeting with SALEP.”

Within South Africa, the workers and youth are striving to build the African National Congress as a mass organisation democratically controlled by the organised working class, as the vehicle for carrying through the revolutionary struggle of all the oppressed for democracy and socialism. Members and supporters of SALEP join in this shoulder-to-shoulder with all other active strugglers.

But in exile, unfortunately, the African National Congress is dominated by middle class nationalists and the South African Communist Party. Instead of basing their policies on the revolutionary and socialist aspirations of the mass of the oppressed, they have argued that apartheid can be ended on the basis of compromises with “progressive” capitalists, inside and outside South Africa.

For years – while black workers were patiently laying the foundations of militant independent trade unions (now grown to more than half-a-million strong) – these exiled leaders argued that no genuine trade unionism could exist under the repressive conditions of apartheid. They remain opposed to the building of direct links between the workers’ movement inside South Africa and internationally.

They fear the quest of the organised workers and youth for genuine Marxist methods and policies on which to build the movement in the country. In recent years, at the behest of the SACP leadership, there has been a bureaucratic suppression of Marxist ideas within the ranks of the ANC in exile.

Who is behind these “charges”?

The witchhunt against SALEP must seem a mystery to activists in the workers’ movement – until it is understood that this has been instigated to serve the interests of a narrow right-wing Stalinist clique in exile. They are hysterically hostile to the modest contribution which SALEP is making towards socialist education and the development of direct links. Now they have succeeded in carrying their attack on SALEP into the ruling bodies of the British Labour Party with the assistance of right-wingers plus certain so-called ‘lefts’ over whom they exercise an influence.

Not accidentally, the investigation into SALEP was launched (on the Labour Party NEC’s Youth Sub-Committee), by an official of the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS). This organisation is presently led by a faction of self-styled ‘lefts’, whose real politics are shown in the fact that they sought to discourage British students from actively supporting the miners’ strike, and who continued to support the state-controlled Polish student union during the 1980-81 workers’ uprising against the Stalinist bureaucracy.

This NOLS official launched his attack by opposing funds for a leaflet produced by the Labour Party Young Socialists and SALEP in support of the mid-1984 struggle of the black South African mineworkers for a living wage.

The International Department report, later endorsed by the NEC, was “researched” by another ex-student leader of the same stripe, now employed by the Labour Party headquarters.

Not content with launching this divisive witch-hunt on their own account, moreover, this narrow clique of Stalinists and their supporters, is relying on and collaborating with right-wing leaders of the British labour movement who presently dominate the NEC and other committees of the Labour Party.

Thus in the end the so-called “spectrum of mainstream of progressive opinion” with which the NEC report identifies, reduces, when closely examined, to the class-collaborationist interests of the right-wing of the labour movement, which coincide on this issue with the narrow factional interests of Stalinists.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the same right-wing elements in the British trade union movement, at the same time that this attack is taking place on the South African workers’ movement, have launched an organisation called ‘Mainstream’ to counter-attack against the growing influence of the Broad Left within the British trade union movement.

Nor is the attack confined to Marxism within the South African labour movement. In the same month that the NEC report was issued, Marxist trade unionists in Zimbabwe (including supporters of SALEP) campaigning for democratic unions and socialist workers’ education, were detained – and some tortured – by the Mugabe government.

“One up for Mugabe”, trumpeted the right-wing Tory newspaper, the Daily Telegraph,[2] who saw in this evidence that the so-called ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Mugabe was without doubt bowing to capitalist ‘realities’.

Scandalously – in another example of the rapprochement between so-called “Marxist-Leninists” and Labour’s right-wing – Labour Party General Secretary Mortimer blamed these detentions not on the Zimbabwe government – but on the detained activists themselves![3]

Not only in Southern Africa, but in Britain and other countries, the ideas of genuine Marxism are under concerted attack from the right-wing leaders of the labour movement and the “Communist” party leaders too. It is a sign of their inability to face-up to the deepening world crisis of capitalism, which is bringing the big battalions of the international labour movement into renewed struggle for workers’ power and socialism – and into renewed struggle to transform their own organisations into fighting democratic instruments for that task.

Today there are greater demands being placed on SALEP from the movement in Southern Africa to carry forward our work than has been the case since SALEP’s formation. It is to fulfil these needs that our energies must be directed.

At the same time, we find it necessary to reply to this attack which has been launched on SALEP, not merely to answer the ‘charges’, but to reveal what lies behind them.

We do this in the confidence that the rank-and-file of the labour movement in Britain, judging the issues on their merits, will continue to give support to SALEP’s work and campaign to reverse the decision of the NEC.

Also we believe that, through clarification of the issues involved, the labour movement will be better armed to give the most effective support to the revolutionary movement of working people in South Africa against apartheid and capitalism.

What is SALEP and what work has it done?

The South African Labour Education Project was formed in March 1980 to provide socialist educational material for the workers’ movement in South Africa of a kind that could not be produced openly in the country. It was founded at the request of activists inside the country, but, to carry out this work, established its central offices in London.

An article in the NATSOPA Journal and Graphic Review (October 1980), reproduced here as an appendix, explains SALEP’s formation and purposes more fully.

Profiteering from Cheap Labour

In August 1980 SALEP published Profiteering from Cheap Labour: wages paid by British companies in South Africa. This was the first comprehensive compilation of minimum wage levels paid by British companies in South Africa.

It explained the links between cheap labour in South Africa and mass unemployment in Britain, the importance of the struggle for a national minimum wage index-linked to the cost of living, and the need not only for isolating the apartheid regime and the capitalists it defends, but for building direct links between South African workers and workers internationally.

Profiteering criticised the approach to poverty wages in South Africa taken by the EEC, etc. ‘Codes of Conduct’ – which in essence leave the payment of living wages up to the goodwill of the employers. It criticised also the attempt by academics within South Africa to define ‘poverty datum lines’ as the basis for minimum wages. “Only the workers know what their own needs are” was our argument.

The pamphlet was eagerly snapped up in the labour movement in South Africa and Britain, and two printings of it were rapidly sold out. (A supplement updating the wage levels, and a later SALEP publication on the minimum wages paid by Dutch companies in South Africa met with a similar response.)

Asinamali!

SALEP’s second publication was Asinamali! (‘We have no money!’). This contained facts, explanations and arguments in support of the struggle of black workers in South Africa for a living wage.

It explained why starvation wages were the basis for the capitalist system in South Africa and analysed the capitalist method of exploiting wage labour. It also examined some of the arguments often used by employers against the demand for a living wage, and exposed their incorrectness.

It supported the struggle for a national minimum wage linked to the cost of living. At the same time it pointed out that this struggle is completely bound-up with the struggle to abolish apartheid and the capitalist system.

Asinamali! has to date gone into three printings and has not only been widely circulated but warmly appreciated in the labour movement in Southern Africa and internationally.

Not long after its first appearance, SALEP received a number of translations of Asinamali!, made by supporters in Southern Africa, into the African languages spoken by the South African workers. In 1982 one of these, in Xhosa, was printed, and has also had extensive circulation within South Africa. A Setswana version has since been produced within Southern Africa.

We Live Like Dogs

Since in South Africa more than half of adult black workers, deprived of education by apartheid oppression, can neither read nor write, audio-visual material has a vital role to play in education which assists their struggle.

With this in mind, SALEP’s next production, in 1982, was a slide-tape, ‘We Live Like Dogs’, outlining the conditions and the struggles of black migrant mineworkers. Written by a black youth with working experience on the South African mines, it follows the experiences of a typical migrant mineworker, from Lesotho – and puts those experiences in the context of the whole cheap labour system of apartheid which is the basis of the huge profitability of the SA gold mining industry.

It was partly financed by contributions from the South Wales and North Derbyshire areas of the British NUM.

It explained the need for mineworkers to become organised and to build a strong mass union – and how their oppression and their strategic position in the South African economy gave them a vital role to play in the struggle to end apartheid and capitalism and for a democratic workers’ state in South Africa. It called for maximum international labour movement support for this struggle.

In the latter part of 1982 the South African National Union of Mineworkers was formed, and grew rapidly into the first real union of the black mineworkers for 36 years. This was a historic step.

To take account of the new developments, the slide-tape was revised, to encourage the building of the SA NUM and international support for this. In 1984 it was again updated and turned into a video, both in English and in Sesotho.

The slide-tape and the video have been widely used amongst Southern African workers, and within the labour movement in Britain and other countries.

In particular, they were widely shown in mining areas in the course of the 1984-85 British miners’ strike, and aroused support for the struggle of South African mineworkers. “We are facing difficult conditions and having to make sacrifices, but black mineworkers in South Africa have to put up with ten times more”, was a typical response.

Solidarity with the SA NUM

When, in mid-1984, the NUM declared a dispute with the SA Chamber of Mines, the most powerful employer in the country, the Labour Party Young Socialists asked SALEP to assist in the production of a solidarity leaflet – which was certainly the first, and probably the only, one circulated within the British labour movement on the issue.

In this struggle, the SA NUM made history by securing the first concessions on wages ever made by the Chamber of Mines to organised black mineworkers. Last-minute settlement led to the calling-off of the strike on the first day. However even this victory was achieved only at the cost of the killing and injuring by police of hundreds of mineworkers – a reminder of the brutal repression which South African working people face in the struggle for even the most limited improvements in their lives.

Every worker in Britain and South Africa would have expected all-out support from the British Labour Party leadership for the SA NUM. Yet they not only vetoed financial assistance for the LPYS/SALEP leaflet, but then initiated an “enquiry” into SALEP!

Later in 1984 SALEP assisted in briefing striking British miner Roy Jones, who had been invited to visit South Africa by the SA NUM. Roy spent one month sharing the experiences not only of black mineworkers, but of other black workers, women, and youth, down the mines, in the hostels, and in the townships – and was warmly and generously welcomed. He attended and spoke at two regional congresses of the National Union of Mineworkers – explaining the issues involved in the British strike.

Roy Jones had the honour to be made the first white member of the SA NUM, and also returned with a donation from black South African mineworkers to the British miners’ strike. Even the South African capitalist press was forced to concede that this was a historic achievement.

On his return SALEP produced a bulletin with a first-hand report by Roy Jones, to strengthen support for the struggles of black mineworkers, and to promote links between the SA NUM and the labour movement internationally.

This bulletin has been enthusiastically received by the South African mineworkers, as well as by many labour movement activists in Britain and internationally. Now in its second printing, it is already laying the basis for strengthened links, in preparation for the huge and bitter battles which lie ahead for the mineworkers.

Training Programme

SALEP has also undertaken a modest education and training programme for black youth from Southern Africa. A SALEP Scholarship Fund was established in 1982, and through it directly as well as through other indirect assistance, a number of black youth have been provided with technical training in Britain and experience in the British labour movement. Also workers and youth from other Southern African countries have been brought on visits to Britain to gain experience within the British labour movement.

Southern Africa

In 1982 SALEP changed its name to the “Southern African Labour Education Project”.

SALEP had always viewed the workers’ struggle in South Africa in its international context. The change of name was to make explicit our commitment to assisting with education, links, and common understanding among workers throughout the Southern African region – in recognition of the reality that their problems could not be separated.

The domination of South African capitalism over the region has created a network of exploitation compelling working people into struggle against a common enemy.

The migrant labour system draws many thousands of black workers from independent surrounding states to the mines and farms of South Africa; and at the same time South African based multinationals such as De Beers and the Anglo-American Corporation spread their tentacles through the sub-continent and beyond.

In 1983 SALEP produced a pamphlet on Zimbabwe’s Labour Relations Bill 1983: Danger for the Trade Union Movement. Its 43 pages provided a detailed analysis of the draconian consequences of the Bill for the Zimbabwean working class. Among other measures, the Bill proposed virtually to outlaw strikes, and to bring the trade unions under the direct control of the state. This Bill was enacted by the Zimbabwe Parliament, with some of its worst features strengthened, in late 1984.

An introductory chapter explained how these anti-working class measures flowed from the failure of the ZANU government to carry out the socialist promises on which it was elected at independence in 1980. Instead it had compromised with capitalism: the big factories, mines, and farms remained in the ownership of the same bosses who existed under Smith’s white minority regime, rather than being taken into common ownership under workers’ control and management, or, for the land, being distributed to the African peasantry.

SALEP has also produced a slide-tape on the history of the Zimbabwe trade unions from the time of colonial conquest until the present.

This work has had enthusiastic support among those workers in Zimbabwe who have been at the forefront of the struggle to build mass democratic unions, to organise socialist workers’ education, and to build ZANU as a movement under workers’ leadership to carry through the socialist transformation of society.

Unfortunately the ZANU government, facing mounting discontent because of its compromise with capitalism, is moving to the creation of a one-party dictatorship – by indiscriminate terror not only against the Ndebele minority, but against opposition from workers within ZANU(PF) itself.

In March 1985 fourteen ZANU(PF) supporters, trade unionists and socialists – all also supporters or members of SALEP – were arrested and detained without charges, and some tortured, by the security police. They had been campaigning for democratic trade unionism and organising socialist workers’ education.

Among them was the President of the General, Engineering and Metal Workers Union, and other officials of that union. Others were local ZANU leaders – one of whom had been arrested by Smith’s regime in 1971 for leading ZANU opposition to white minority rule.

As a result of a huge wave of protest by the international labour movement against this arrest of socialists by a ‘socialist’ government, all have been released. The two South African exiles and one Dutch comrade among those detained have, however, been deported; while the Zimbabweans continue to be harassed and victimised by the regime.

These detentions highlight not only the hazards involved in assisting with socialist workers’ education in Southern Africa, but also the vital need which is felt for it by increasing numbers of working people throughout the region.

SALEP will not be deterred by this repression, but will only intensify its efforts in Zimbabwe, as well as in South Africa and other Southern African countries.

Incredibly, however, it was at the same time that supporters of SALEP were being detained and tortured by the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe that the Labour Party NEC carried through its decision to witchhunt against us!

The NEC’s “Charges” Against SALEP’s Educational Work

The Labour Party International Department which compiled the NEC’s report was fully aware of all this educational work.

Yet it suppresses most of this information. No mention is made of SALEP’s publications in African languages, nor of its audio-visual productions. No mention is made of SALEP’s material on Zimbabwe. No mention is made of SALEP’s training programme for black youth.

Nevertheless, without even presenting serious argument to support them, the report lays the most sweeping ‘charges’ against SALEP’s educational work. Let us examine them in turn.

1. “No evidence is forthcoming from South African black and non-racial unions that they support SALEP.”

Under apartheid law most strikes are illegal. It is also a serious criminal offence to advocate “any political, industrial, social or economic change” by so-called “disruptive” means, i.e. by the methods of collective action which are all that lies at the disposal of the South African masses.

Not only workers and youth in struggle, but even simple advocates of disinvestment, as well as mild ‘liberals’ have been prosecuted under these and related ‘security’ laws of the apartheid regime.

So it is not surprising that SALEP does not seek to publicise evidence of its supporters in South Africa, nor of precisely who is using or benefiting from the material that it has produced.

Nevertheless the statement that ‘no evidence’ was forthcoming from South African trade unions of their support for SALEP is a straight and deliberate lie.

Such evidence was presented to the International Department researcher who compiled the report, and further evidence was presented to the Labour Party NEC. This was not all the evidence that could have been produced. But it was enough to show this work was welcomed by a major trade union, and that there were demands for SALEP to be producing more material.

2. SALEP’S educational work “gives the appearance of being a method of creating political cadres rather than assisting genuine trade unionists.”

Black workers in South Africa have built the trade unions over the last ten years first and foremost as mass instruments for defending and advancing their living standards. But they have built these organisations at the same time with a political purpose and for political goals.

As Thami Mali, one of the leaders of the two-day general strike in the Transvaal in November last year, stated to a capitalist newspaper: “More than ever before people have realised that their struggle at the factory floor will never be solved until the whole system of government has been changed.”[4]

Whether in South Africa, Britain, or elsewhere, only the most crass right-wingers in the labour movement assert that a rigid dividing line can be drawn between trade unionism and politics, or between trade union education and political education.

Does the Labour Party NEC believe that education of trade unionists about Tory anti-union legislation, or about the Tory attack on the political levy, is “a method of creating political cadres rather than assisting genuine trade unionists” – which warrants the proscription of those who engage in it from contact with the Labour Party?

The idea is absurd.

Still less can workers in South Africa, faced day by day with a regime which acts hand-in-hand with the employers to attack workers’ living standards, workers’ rights, and workers’ demands, afford to draw any water-tight division between ‘trade-unionism’ and ‘politics’.

In the 1950s the South African Congress of Trade Unions was built on the principle that:

Sactu is conscious of the fact that the organizing of the mass of workers for higher wages, better conditions of life and labour is inextricably bound-up with a determined struggle for political rights and liberation from all oppressive laws and practices. It follows that a mere struggle for the economic rights of all the workers without participation in the general struggle for political emancipation would condemn the Trade Union movement to uselessness and to a betrayal of the interests of the workers.

SALEP, with the whole militant workers’ movement in SA, firmly defends these principles. All our material bases itself on the everyday needs of the mass of workers – such as the struggle for a living wage. At the same time SALEP consistently points out how this struggle is inseparable from the overall political struggle to end apartheid and capitalism in South Africa, and from the political struggle of the workers internationally to transform society.

What on earth is there in this position to warrant the quarantining of SALEP from the Labour Party? On the contrary, it represents the finest traditions of the labour movement, in Britain, South Africa, and internationally.

3. “Relations with the black and non-racial trade unions in South Africa would be put in jeopardy if the Party gave any encouragement to SALEP.”

Of course, the NEC report provides not a shred of evidence or argument for this ridiculous assertion, nor could they.

How could the encouragement of socialist education or international worker contact put the Labour Party’s relations with the black and non-racial trade unions “in jeopardy”?

Did the International Department, in compiling this report, even ask a single one of the democratic trade unions in South Africa of their attitude to SALEP, or to SALEP’s material – let alone pose the question to them of whether SALEP is so ‘dangerous’ to the workers’ movement as to warrant quarantining from the Labour Party?

In reality it is only the capitalist class and its supporters, in South Africa and internationally, that has anything to fear from socialist education or the promotion of direct links among workers internationally.

The NEC’s Model for Workers’ Education

What, however, is more disturbing than these ridiculous accusations is what the NEC report advocates as a model form of workers’ education.

SALEP’s grand offers of educational support to workers are insignificant, given their exile, compared to organizations providing education on the ground. British Trade Unions have, through the ICFTU,[5] supported the Urban Training Project and the Industrial Health Research Group who are performing valuable work with shop stewards on the ground in South Africa.

The Urban Training Project (UTP)? What is it?

Workers in South Africa, deprived by the apartheid regime of access to any real education, have sought to benefit as much as possible from anything provided. The Urban Training Project may have, within its limits, served certain of their needs.

At the same time workers whose trade union dues in Britain are being channelled via the TUC and the ICFTU to the UTP should be aware of precisely what this organisation is and how it is regarded.

The UTP was established in the Transvaal in the early 1970s as one of several ‘service centres’ for the emerging independent trade union movement. Other such centres included the Institute for Industrial Education in Durban, and the Western Province Workers’ Advice Bureau in Cape Town.

Even at that time, the UTP was regarded within the emerging workers’ movement – and also by the IIE and the WPWAB – as on the right-wing of the trade union education spectrum.

A British TUC delegation which visited South Africa in 1973 itself characterised the UTP as a “moderate and cautious organisation, working within severely practical limits”. It pointed out that, in contrast to the other education centres, the UTP was uncritical of the white-dominated Trade Union Council of South Africa, which was seeking to bring African workers under its paternalistic domination.

The whole thrust of the UTP’s education has been to reproduce in South Africa the prescriptions of the right-wing of the British labour leadership – that the function of union leaders is to persuade workers to accept the inevitability of ‘compromise’ with their bosses, and to keep trade-unionism separated from politics.

In its bitter hostility to SALEP’s modest contribution to socialist workers’ education, this is the alternative which the Labour Party NEC seeks to impose on the South African workers!

Today only a small minority of the black workers organised in democratic unions use the UTP for workers’ education. Neither the trade unions affiliated to the Federation of South African Trade Unions, nor such unaffiliated unions as the General Workers Union, or the Food and Canning Workers Union, nor the South African Allied Workers Union, have anything to do with it.

Even within the Council of Unions of South Africa, whose affiliates have used the UTP in the past, its educational work is not unchallenged. At the 1984 CUSA annual conference the South African National Union of Mineworkers, by far the largest of the CUSA unions, criticised the UTP’s education for being “ineffectual”.[6]

If the Labour Party NEC intends to hold-up the UTP’s educational programme as the model for the education of the workers’ movement in South Africa – then it is this attitude which risks “jeopardising” its relations with the South African trade unions.

But this position indicates how far to the right the right-wing, and even a part of the ‘left’ of the leadership of the Labour Party is moving in its policies towards the South African liberation struggle.

On March 22^nd 1975, Ken Gill, General Secretary of AUEW-TASS, and seven Labour Party MP’s, including Neil Kinnock, signed a letter to the Guardian. They expressed “deep concern” at the contact that had been established between Ruskin College, Oxford and the Institute of Industrial Education (IIE) in Durban, and at the TUC’s financial support for the IIE.

They stated:

It is certain that such a trade union centre would need the agreement of the Vorster regime to function, otherwise the leaders and full-time black organisers would become very easy prey to the security forces and suffer the same fate as those before them.

The TUC’s action “could be construed as contravening the boycott of South Africa”.

Even then, this position – of isolating trade unionists and workers’ education programmes along with the apartheid regime – was a profoundly mistaken one, which reflected the false perspectives being propagated by the SACP leadership in exile.

For, despite the repression of many of those workers trained by the IIE at the hands of the security police, the trade unions they were helping to build have gone from strength to strength.

But the main point is that while in 1975 Neil Kinnock was calling for a total boycott of the IIE – ten years later he and his supporters are holding-up as a model an education programme (the UTP) which stands well to the right of where even the IIE did ten years ago! All this for the purpose of denying support to a socialist education project – SALEP.

SALEP has never expected that the right-wing of the Labour leadership, or those ‘lefts’ moving rightwards, would offer positive support for the socialist educational programme which we are undertaking.

However the black South African workers demand the right to determine for themselves the kind of workers’ education that they want, and not to have models forced on them, or withheld from them, at the dictates of the leadership of the British labour movement.

SALEP calls for no more and no less than the right to campaign for support for its work by putting forward its ideas in the labour movement, whether in Southern Africa, Britain, or elsewhere, and to have those ideas tested, supported, modified, or rejected, in the light of the workers’ own experience.

SALEP, which would defend that same right in respect of the UTP, however much it might disagree with the UTP’s ideas, calls on the NEC of the Labour Party to remove the proscription which it is placing on SALEP.

Moreover, as if it were not bad enough that the leadership of the British Labour Party is endorsing such reactionary views on how workers’ education should be conducted in South Africa, it is also claiming in the report the authority of the African National Congress.

Do these arguments represent in reality the viewpoint of the National Executive of the ANC or the National Executive of Sactu? Were this the case, black workers and youth in South Africa would be scandalised.

Would these bodies maintain:

In defiance of Sactu’s own founding principles, that a wall must be built to separate ‘trade union education’ from ‘political education’?
That the Urban Training Project’s pro-capitalist educational programmes are a suitable model for the education of black workers in South Africa, and a socialist education project, SALEP, unsuitable?

Black workers and youth in South Africa seeking to build a mass ANC on a socialist programme for an end to apartheid and capitalism have the right to know the answers to these questions.

It is the responsibility of the International Department, which compiled this report, to produce the evidence on these matters. What discussions were held with representatives of the ANC and Sactu? And with which representatives were they? Does the International Department have written statements from the NEC’s of the ANC or Sactu on these questions – or on any other of the “charges” that it raises in its report.

Since the report bases its arguments on principles of ‘joint determination’ of policy with the ANC and Sactu, the leadership has the responsibility to confirm or deny these claims.

SALEP calls on the National Executives of the ANC and Sactu to make clear whether or not these arguments represent their position.

The NEC’s “Political Charges” Against SALEP

Is SALEP’S “interpretation of events … completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion, both within and outside South Africa?”

This is the political ‘accusation’ levelled against SALEP in the NEC’s report.

Even were it true, it would in no way justify the bureaucratic decision to try to proscribe SALEP from the Labour Party. SALEP, like any other organisation, has the right to win support from members and bodies of the Labour Party through discussion and debate and the ability to put forward its ideas.

However, the accusation is totally without foundation.

The arguments and explanations put forward by SALEP are precisely in the ‘mainstream’ of the opinions of working people in struggle in South Africa, and of millions in the worldwide labour movement in solidarity with that struggle.

Let us examine the ‘arguments’ on which the NEC bases its accusation.

1. “A central feature of SALEP’s approach is its heavy emphasis on wage-levels in South Africa. Its first two publications – Profiteering from Cheap Labour and Asinamali!: The Workers Case provide a valuable insight into SALEP’s very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.”

It will be astounding news to workers struggling against low pay and starvation wages that “a heavy emphasis on wage levels” is “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion.”

In Britain workers look to the Labour Party and to the TUC to carry forward an implacable struggle against cheap labour, whether in Britain or anywhere in the world.

In South Africa in the 1950s, the South African Congress of Trade Unions was built around a campaign which placed a “heavy emphasis on wage levels” – the campaign for a £1-a-day minimum wage for black workers on starvation wages.

The rebuilding of the trade union movement in South Africa in the last twelve years has been based – above all – on the struggle against poverty wages, constantly eroded by rising prices; and it is a struggle which has been carried forward overwhelmingly through the weapon of illegal strike action.

Both Profiteering from Cheap Labour and Asinamali! were published by SALEP as a contribution towards arming the workers’ movement in South Africa to continue this struggle, and to strengthen solidarity with this struggle in the international labour movement.

So far “outside the spectrum” of “mainstream progressive opinion” was Profiteering, for example, that it attracted widespread attention and favourable comment in the labour movement press. Its impact was acknowledged even in the capitalist-owned media.

Within South Africa, the Transvaal Post – then the leading daily newspaper for blacks in the country, which was banned not long afterwards – devoted two front-page stories to the publication.

The first[7] was headlined: “BRITISH COMPANIES EXPOSED: BAD PAY SHOCK” – and its reporters, on the basis of the facts revealed in Profiteering, conducted a campaign to expose some of the companies involved, drawing attention to the fact that some of them were paying wages less than R20 (£11) a week in 1979.

Profiteering sparked-off investigations into companies paying low wages in SA, not only by the Post in SA, but by the Birmingham Post and the Slough Evening Mail in Britain.

Labour Weekly,[8] official organ of the British Labour Party, pointed out – from the pamphlet – that the same companies which had laid off over 200,000 workers in Britain during May and June 1980 were paying their black workers in South Africa less than one-third of the wages they paid in Britain.

The TGWU Record (October 1980) stated that Profiteering raised the question “Do you know what your employer pays its workers in South Africa?” – and the TGWU National Executive ordered 50 copies for its own use.

Labour Research[9] described it as “a very useful pamphlet”, and The Food Worker[10] said it “should prove invaluable to the labour movement”.

None of these – or other labour movement reports and reviews –needless to say, criticised SALEP for placing a “heavy emphasis” on wage-levels in South Africa.

But the publication was criticised… by the South African bosses and their spokesmen!

Defending the employers, the South African Star accused Profiteering of having a position on wages “which is couched in anti-capitalist jargon.” (Anticipating by almost five years the ‘insight’ of today’s Labour Party NEC, the Star might have added that this showed SALEP’s “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.”)

Profiteering was also one of the publications used by a United Nations body at a government conference on South Africa in Geneva. The Dutch bourgeois delegate criticised the UN’s use of “tendentious documents prepared by radical groups, including one entitled Profiteering from Cheap Labour”.[11]

To say the least, it is curious to find the same criticisms made by the South African and European bosses and their spokesmen echoed in a document of the British Labour Party.

But the NEC right-wing majority (and its so-called ‘left’ supporters) are clearly untroubled by any such coincidence. Nor have they noticed a little contradiction in the ‘charges’ they level against SALEP. We are accused, at one and the same time, of placing a “heavy emphasis on wage levels” and of conducting a “political … rather than … genuine trade union” education programme.

The real objection of the NEC is revealed in the words: “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias.” All their haughty declarations shrivel into a bare defence of reformist against revolutionary ideas – to kow-towing to capitalism rather than supporting a struggle for its overthrow.

Thus they advance the charge:

2. SALEP holds the view that “the struggle (for liberation in South Africa) cannot be separated from the struggle against capitalism.”

The struggle for democracy – for one-person one-vote in an undivided South Africa – is the central political issue for the mass movement.

The African majority – overwhelmingly working people and their families – demand the right to determine the policy of central government in accordance with their numbers. They demand the right to elect representatives who will set about changing the material conditions of their lives – securing decent wages and homes, jobs, education and health for all.

But the actual conditions in which the working people struggle hammer-home all the time that there can be no separation between the struggle for democracy against the apartheid regime and against the capitalist bosses.

Despite repression, despite censorship, this is the position put forward frequently and widely in the trade union, youth etc. movement and their press.

Let us take just a few examples.

Moses Mayekiso, Transvaal branch Secretary of the 40,000-strong Fosatu-affiliated Metal and Allied Workers Union, addressed its 1983 Annual General Meeting.

Since that time Moses Mayekiso has served as Fosatu representative on the committee which led the November 1984 two-day general strike in the Transvaal – a strike of nearly one million workers in the industrial heartland of South Africa. For serving on that committee Brother Mayekiso recently faced charges of ‘subversion’.

To an audience of 5,000 at the Mawu AGM Brother Mayekiso stated:

We must fight all kinds of exploitation through our strength…We believe that workers as a class should fight their own problems. As the enemy is only one – capitalism – and all other things like influx control are merely appendages…Retrenchments have taught workers that the capitalists are only interested in production and profits – not the workers.[12]

Thozamile Gqweta, President of the 70,000-strong South African Allied Workers’ Union, spoke to its Annual Conference in 1984.

Brother Gqweta has been in and out, in and out, of the regime’s torture chambers. He is presently, along with a number of leaders of the United Democratic Front, facing charges of ‘high treason’.

To this conference Brother Gqweta said:

The workers’ struggle in South Africa has entered a new and quite fascinating phase; that is the emergence of class consciousness content in their struggle for total liberation. The community struggles against removals at Cross Roads in Cape Town, the community struggles against bus fare increases at Lamontville in Durban, and the community struggles against bus fare increases in East London…are living manifestations of this class consciousness in the present phase of our working class struggle in South Africa…

Let us all look forward to the workers’ struggle ahead with rededication and hope and fight them with the consciousness of the workers and their knowledge about trade unionism to a commendable level of awareness and will drive away all their fears thus leading the way to the intensification of their struggle against capitalist exploitation.[13]

Finally, let us take a centre page article in Izwilethu, (June/July 1984), official journal of the Council of Unions of South Africa. CUSA presently claims a membership of 250,000.

This article states:

Apartheid and its Big Brother capitalism has been with us in one form or another for centuries.

It is time this comes to an end. The Workers have built up this country. It is time it belongs to them…

The real struggle is for a new system which will redistribute the wealth of this country to as many people as possible – selfish and individualistic capitalism has no place in it.

The government realises this. It is not trying to preserve an irrational racism. It is fighting for the survival of capitalism.

That is what the real struggle is all about.

Pik Botha said he was not prepared to die for apartheid in a lift. P.W.Botha agreed – adapt or die, the Wise Man said.

But what they both forgot to tell us was that they were prepared to die for capitalism. Adapt apartheid, yes, but in such a way that capitalism will not be changed.

Here spokesmen for three of the main union bodies in SA – representing an overwhelming majority of organised black workers – state clearly the inseparable connection between apartheid and capitalism.

Yet the NEC report has the audacity to claim that the view that the struggle in South Africa is against capitalism is “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion inside and outside South Africa”!

Members of the NEC should have attended the recent May Day meeting organised by 31 of the non-racial unions in a hall in the centre of Johannesburg – which was ringed, in the course of the meeting, by police armed with automatic rifles (the first time these weapons have been deployed in the centre of Johannesburg).

At this meeting, reports the bourgeois press:

Most speakers spoke in Zulu and identified capitalism as the enemy of the black working class in South Africa. Others spoke of the fight for an eight-hour day and the abolition of overtime as exploitative… Mr Sipho Radebe, of the 250,000-member Council of Unions of South Africa, said the meeting was historic because they had achieved a unity which surpassed even their own expectations.

‘Our solidarity and unity will leave the oppressors trembling with fear,’ he added.

‘No other class can set us free from our bondage, but we ourselves in the working class.’

… A speaker from the Federation of South African Trade Unions, introduced only as Ntsamani, brought most of the audience to its feet when he said capitalism was the enemy of the workers and sang and hummed: ‘Capitalism, capitalism is our enemy’.[14]

The same views dominate in the youth movement: even a journalist in the principal newspaper of the capitalist class in Britain, the Financial Times, recently conceded that, in South Africa, “in the eyes of the young, apartheid is equated with capitalism.”[15]

Of course, the bosses would like to pretend that such views do not represent the “mainstream”. Thus Harry Oppenheimer, the biggest capitalist magnate in SA, recently attacked in the Tory Sunday Times “left-wing radicals, often Marxists, who believe that racial discrimination and private enterprise are parts of the same system and should be eliminated together” who often “succeed in taking the much larger numbers, who believe in free enterprise and would like to see the blacks sharing fully in its benefits, for a ride.”[16]

Is the Labour Party NEC falling for Oppenheimer’s “interpretation of events”, rather than that of Mayekiso,Gqweta, Radebe, Ntsamani, etc., and the organisations they represent – and the whole black South African youth movement besides?

Or is it not rather the responsibility of the British Labour Party to take its cue from those in the forefront of the struggle inside South Africa, and join with them in the struggle not merely against the apartheid regime but also against the capitalist class whose profit system it defends?

3. SALEP “sees trade unions acting in the place of political parties and the ANC”.

Of course, this claim is nonsense, and the report could find no evidence for it in SALEP’s publications or anywhere else.

The trade unions are essential instruments in the day-to-day struggles of the workers, and have at the same time a vital political role to play. But, in its struggle, the working class needs a political arm as well as an industrial arm.

This is why SALEP supports the building of the African National Congress as the mass political organisation of the oppressed, under the leadership of the working class, to carry forward the revolutionary struggle against apartheid and capitalism.

On this issue, too, the International Department report cannot get matters straight. SALEP, it states, “acknowledges that workers in South Africa see the ANC as the organisation that will bring liberation”.

Working people in South Africa support the ANC, because of the role it played in the 1950s, as the vehicle through which their ranks can be politically united in mass struggle against the regime and the bosses. But, already engaged in huge battles against one of the most formidable regimes on the planet, they do not ‘see’ the ANC as something outside themselves whose leadership will ‘bring liberation’ to them, while they sit waiting for it.

From where would such ‘liberation’ be ‘brought’? Would it come as a gift from somewhere? From Botha perhaps? Or from Western imperialism? Or would it be a gift from the ‘gods’?

In reality, the more that working people move into struggle in South Africa, the more it is clear that it is through their own organised efforts alone that liberation will be fought for, and won. But, for victory, this struggle must be politically unified, in a single organisation, with a clear perspective, programme and strategy, and a leadership imbued with this.

More and more among the organised workers and the youth seek to build, for this purpose, a mass African National Congress. But, to achieve victory, it will be necessary that the ANC is built around a programme for democracy and socialism under the control of the organised working class, rallying all the oppressed.

This will require the struggle by the organised workers and the black youth for Marxist perspectives, programme, strategy and leadership within the ANC.

It is this struggle which the British Labour Party should be supporting to the hilt.

It is as a contribution to carrying forward this work that SALEP produces its educational material and assists with the strengthening of direct links.

4. SALEP “dismisses” the United Democratic Front.

Again, this charge is absolute rubbish.

In the present conditions, where the working class is not yet able to rebuild the ANC as an open mass organisation in South Africa, SALEP has warmly supported the formation of the United Democratic Front, but not without criticism.

In its last Annual Report, SALEP welcomed the formation of the United Democratic Front:

In August 1983 the United Democratic Front was launched at a huge conference outside Cape Town. Organised and unorganised workers greeted its formation with enthusiasm, hoping that here was a nationwide banner continuing the best traditions of the Congress movement of the 1950s, which would serve as a vehicle for unifying and taking forward the political struggle against the regime.

We continued:

Unfortunately, the UDF has thus far failed to live up to the expectations vested in it. This is because the leaders of important trade unions have failed to take their members into it in an organised way, transforming the UDF into an organisation led by the workers, and with a clear workers’ programme in the interests of all the oppressed.

To support it’s “charge” that SALEP has “hostility” to, and “dismisses” the UDF, the NEC report characteristically distorts the evidence. It quotes from our Annual Report the second of these paragraphs – while totally suppressing the preceding one!

SALEP, it continues, criticises the “middle class” character of the UDF leadership. Quite so.

In fact, precisely similar criticisms of the UDF leadership have been voiced, and continue to be voiced, by workers and youth inside South Africa.

The Fosatu Central Committee of October 15/16 1983, for example, resolved that “the unity of purpose created within worker-controlled organisations whose class base and purpose are clear would be lost within an organisation such as the UDF. The UDF represents a variety of class interests with no clear constitutional structure within which the majority of citizens can control the organisation.” The UDF is regarded by Fosatu, in other words, as a non-worker-controlled, i.e. middle class-controlled, organisation.

The NEC report asserts that SALEP’s criticism of the UDF “draws its meagre strength from the absence of some union groupings from its ranks” but that our “case is exaggerated”.

This is a further – and double – distortion. In the first place the “some union groupings” which remain unaffiliated to the UDF include most of those which will launch a new democratic trade union federation in the course of this year – the most representative organisation of the African workers ever, with an initial membership of some 300,000!

But, in the second place, unlike the leaders of these trade unions, SALEP has not drawn the conclusion that the workers’ answer to the problem of the middle class leadership of the UDF is to remain outside its ranks.

Let us repeat what SALEP representatives said to the International Department ‘researcher’ who interviewed us in compiling this report.

The UDF, we said, needs to be built as an organisation under the control of the workers. Trade union leaders in South Africa have said its leadership is middle class. But this criticism is made not because the workers want to drive away the middle class (on the contrary, the bulk of the middle class, oppressed by the monopolies, has an interest in ending not only apartheid but capitalism too).

But there is a big difference between an organisation rallying all the oppressed under the leadership and control of the organised workers, and the present situation of an organisation dominated by its middle class leadership.

We think it is actually a mistake for major trade unions to have stayed outside the UDF, rather than going into the UDF in an organised way and transforming it.

As we also pointed out, events have driven the unions into common action with the UDF, in the hugely successful election boycott last year, for example. Also, the UDF supported the call initiated by most of the major trade unions and the youth organisations for the two-day general strike in the Transvaal in November.

From these facts the NEC report concludes, with an undated quotation from New African magazine, that “Differences in political emphasis have been put aside.”

This is entirely to underestimate the debate that has raged in the black workers and youth movement, and continues to rage, on the political tasks of the organised workers’ movement, and the organisational means by which they can be carried forward. It is entirely to ignore the dissatisfaction felt with a UDF leadership that fails to link the struggle for democracy with the struggle against capitalism.

SALEP continues to call for the building of a United Democratic Front controlled by the organised workers, rallying all the oppressed. In no way is this position “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion”.

Nor would any genuine activist within the workers’ movement in South Africa suggest that the differences which continue to exist on the political way forward for the workers’ movement can be solved by arbitrary bureaucratic fiat – or by attempting to witchhunt ideas out of the workers’ organisations.

In South Africa, and internationally, the traditional method in the workers movement of dealing with differences of viewpoint is through ongoing democratic debate coupled with unity in action against the class enemy.

It is the duty of the Labour Party not to suppress, but to recognise and encourage constructive debate within the workers’ movement, in Britain and internationally.

5. SALEP stands for the ‘full implementation” of the Freedom Charter; SALEP puts forward positions “at variance with the Freedom Charter”.

Here are two completely self-contradictory “charges” – both of which presumably put SALEP “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion”!

This is one of the many brainteasers to be found in the pages of the NEC report.

In reality SALEP supports the Freedom Charter, the programme of the African National Congress – and opposes any attempts to water-down or retreat from its implementation.

The Freedom Charter was first adopted by the Congress of the People in 1955 – the most democratic gathering ever held in South Africa up to that time. Today, as the mass movement has again developed, with unprecedented strength and confidence, it is the programme of the Freedom Charter to which hundreds of thousands of oppressed working people turn.

How does the NEC report justify its claim that SALEP holds positions “at variance with” the Freedom Charter? By quoting one passage from one of our publications, Asinamali!:

The extract reads:

To defend the capitalist system, to protect the property of the capitalists, to maintain the conditions for profit-making, the bosses are supported by the army, the police, the courts, the state as a whole. Together, they resist any changes which would strengthen the workers and endanger their own interests. Naked force backs-up all their ‘arguments’.

In South Africa they rely on the apartheid system with its pass laws, reserves, system of migrant labour and its denial of trade union and political rights to maintain and control the force of cheap black labour which they exploit in their factories, mines and farms.

Thus the struggle for a living wage lies at the root of the class struggle – a struggle between the working class and the capitalist class over how much of the value produced by the workers is taken by the bosses and how much remains for the workers.

Only through the united efforts of the workers, organised together as a class, can the bosses be made to raise wages. The bosses (no matter what they and their ‘liberal spokesmen’ may say) will not do this unless they are forced to.

The NEC also finds this a ‘horrifying’ illustration of SALEP’s “very fundamentalist, Marxist bias” and “extremely narrow view of Marxism”!

What is there in this passage that those on the NEC who have endorsed this report find so offensive? What is there in it that they claim lies “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” in South Africa? What is there in it that they claim is at variance with the Freedom Charter?

Is there any sentence in it which they can deny represents the reality of life for black workers in South Africa?

Will they stand up and explain, to the thousands of mine workers killed and injured by the South African police last year, when they were called in by the Chamber of Mines to brutally suppress a legal strike for higher wages, that it is not “naked force” that backs up all the arguments of the mine-owners – or that the bosses do not rely on the apartheid system?

Will they stand-up and explain that to the relatives, friends and comrades of Steve Biko, Neil Aggett, Andries Raditsela – and all those who have been slaughtered by the South African police and army in Uitenhage, Crossroads, Sebokeng and many other places in the struggles of the last few months alone, at a rate of at least one or two a day.

“At variance with the Freedom Charter”?!

Where does the Freedom Charter deny that the SA bosses rely on apartheid to maintain the cheap labour system? Where does it deny that to defend their interests in profit, the bosses rely on the state machine? Where does it deny that the struggle for a living wage lies at the root of the class struggle?

The Freedom Charter declares:

THERE SHALL BE WORK AND SECURITY

All who work shall be free to form trade unions, to elect their officers and to make wage agreements with their employers;

The state shall recognise the right and duty of all to work, and to draw full unemployment benefits;

Men and women of all races shall receive equal pay for equal work;

There shall be a forty-hour working week, a national minimum wage, paid annual leave, and sick leave for all working mothers;

Miners, domestic workers, farm workers and civil servants shall have the same rights as all others who work;

Child labour, compound labour, the tot system and contract labour shall be abolished.

Will those on the NEC who endorse this report stand up and explain to the black masses in struggle in South Africa how “THERE SHALL BE WORK AND SECURITY” except through “the united efforts of the workers, organised together as a class”?

Of course the bosses have other answers to such questions – which reduce in the end to the argument that the welfare of the workers must be left to what their ‘liberalism’ can afford. Is this the argument which this NEC report endorses?

Let us cite a recent statement by just one boss, Zac De Beer, a long-time member of the ‘liberal bourgeois’ Progressive Federal Party, and also an executive director of Anglo American Corporation – which, as a monopoly empire, owns itself nearly 60% of the shares on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Anglo American Corporation was one of the mining houses which called in police to maim and kill black mineworkers on strike last September. Miner Roy Jones returned from his visit to the SA NUM with one of the plastic bullets which had shot out one such worker’s eye.

Acknowledging that in the past he had campaigned for higher minimum wages, Zac de Beer now calls for all statutory minimum wages to be scrapped. “Today I am pleading for people to be allowed to work for any wage, no matter how low, that they are prepared to accept.”[17]

This shift to the right among the capitalist class is a sign of the times – a sign of the growing economic crisis within South Africa, with over three million unemployed, approaching one million relying for food on charity relief, and the official inflation rate moving upwards towards 20% .

This crisis will compel the capitalists to increase their attacks on the living standards of the working class, and, equally, it will direct the attention of increasing numbers of working people in struggle ever more sharply towards the need not merely to end apartheid, but the profit system of capitalism along with it.

And indeed, the Freedom Charter stands precisely for such a transformation of society – for the nationalisation of the mining industry, the banks and the monopolies under a genuinely democratic government.

“The mineral wealth beneath the soil”, it states, “the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.”

In fact the NEC is scandalised that SALEP stands for “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter. Indeed it proclaims that such a programme is impossible to achieve!

Those who most fear the “full implementation” of the Charter – which includes these demands – are the South African monopolies, and the British and other foreign monopolies and banks with which they are intertwined.

Against imperialism and capitalism SALEP is proud to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with those in struggle in South Africa for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter.

Moreover we share the view expressed in an interview with a SA journalist by Thami Mali, chairman of the committee which organised and led the two-day general strike of one million workers in the Transvaal last November.

Asked what the goals of the struggle were, Thami Mali, reports this journalist, told him that they were one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa, “but that’s not enough. It must be a ‘workers’ state’ based on the principles of the Freedom Charter which they call ‘a set of minimum demands.’ The Freedom Charter is … all about how ‘the people shall govern’ and how the land ‘shall belong to all those who work it.’ … ‘So you want a socialist South Africa, the journalist asked Mali. “ ‘Exactly’, he replied”.[18]

Do those on the Labour Party NEC and International Committee who endorsed this report dare to claim that this courageous strike leader – who has already served five years on Robben Island for giving shelter to ANC activists, and was detained one day after giving this interview – has an “interpretation of events” which puts him “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion both within and outside South Africa” – and which deserves banning from the Labour Party?

SALEP’s support for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter, states the NEC report, “echoes … a similar British debate.”

It is clear that they are referring to the “debate” over Clause IV, Part IV of the Labour Party’s constitution – the clause which calls for the nationalisation under workers’ democratic control and management of the commanding heights of the economy.

What they mean by a “debate” over this clause is the attempt of the Gaitskellite right-wing in the 1950s to remove this clause from the constitution – and the attempt by the present-day right-wing to bury any policies which would allow this clause to be implemented.

Not content with abandoning the struggle in Britain to implement Clause IV, Part IV, the right-wing of the British Labour Party leadership – and those so-called ‘lefts’ who support them – now want to impose the same dilution of the struggle on the movement of the black oppressed in South Africa!

And, moreover, those who call for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter – or, by implication, the full implementation of the Labour Party constitution – are regarded as guilty of a “crime” that warrants banning from the Labour Party!

Only those whose horizons are limited by the belief that capitalism is an ‘eternal’ system that cannot be ended maintain that either the Freedom Charter, or Clause IV, Part IV of the Labour Party constitution cannot be “fully achieved”. In reality, organising and uniting on the right lines as the rallying point for all the oppressed, the working class is perfectly capable of succeeding in these tasks.

Indeed in the present epoch, only the full implementation of the Freedom Charter (or of the Labour Party constitution) – by setting in motion the socialist transformation of society – can guarantee an end to poverty wages, and provide work and security for all.

A leadership of the British Labour Party worth its salt would be going out of its way to defend and support the struggle of the impoverished black workers in South Africa in every demand they have raised against the regime and the employers it defends.

Whether as regards Britain or South Africa, a leadership of the Labour Party should be mobilising the maximum struggle against the Zac de Beers and their class – against the multinational monopolies that dominate the world capitalist economy and enslave working people everywhere.

Instead, the majority of the British Labour Party NEC direct their attack…at SALEP!

But we ask the ANC and Sactu leadership too, (whose authority is claimed by this report) what is your attitude to this attack on those who stand for the “full implementation” of the Freedom Charter?

We call on the ANC and Sactu leadership to publicly dissociate themselves from this attack, and to reaffirm their commitment to the full implementation of the programme with which they are entrusted by the masses.

6. “SALEP believes that ultimately only by ‘arming the workers’ in preparation for a ‘massive workers’ armed insurrection’ will the apartheid regime be overthrown and replaced by a ‘workers’ democracy’.”

Here, the supporters of this report no doubt believe, lies the ultimate clincher to prove that SALEP’s views stand “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion, both within and outside South Africa.”!

In fact SALEP, in its publications, has nowhere expressed its viewpoint on the question of arming the workers’ movement. If, in South Africa, merely propagandising for socialism can bring serious criminal charges, it is understandable that discussion on this question is undertaken with caution. All the more must care be taken by an education project aiming to assist the trade unions in SA.

Nevertheless black workers and youth in South Africa, and members and supporters of SALEP with them, have their views on this question, which they will raise in appropriate discussions.

For many British workers, living under conditions of relative democracy, it may be difficult yet to see that in South Africa no genuine democracy can be achieved without a thoroughgoing, and armed, revolution.

But this is the reality which working people in South Africa face, and which shapes their own understanding of the tasks they must undertake.

The central reality which faces all those in struggle in South Africa is the vicious state machine, built up over generations, resting on the support of, and staffed by, privileged and racist whites. It is a military-police dictatorship more formidable than anywhere else in the capitalist world – and it has at its disposal, and will not hesitate to use against the struggles of the working people, a whole array of weaponry: not merely tear-gas, rhino-whips, dogs trained to maim, plastic and rubber bullets, buckshot… but also machine-guns, tanks, and bombers.

Those on the picket lines in the British miners’ strike, facing the violence of the police, had a real but tiny taste of what black working people have had to fight against for generations in order to defend themselves against even more vicious enslavement.

This state machine has been constructed to defend a system of cheap labour which is the only basis on which capitalism in South Africa can survive – and which it becomes more necessary than ever for the ruling class to defend as capitalism seeks deeper into crisis.

The demand of the oppressed masses for democracy in order to end the cheap labour system brings them into head-on and irreconcilable conflict with this state machine and those who stand on its side.

To defeat and dismantle this state machine of apartheid is indispensable to the achieving of democracy, and it will be a formidable task, requiring every ounce of organisation, determination, and ingenuity that the oppressed masses of South Africa can summon-up.

Even today, when the mass revolution against apartheid and capitalism has only just begun, the regime finds it “necessary” to shoot, injure and imprison thousands in the course of a single year. What will it resort to when its authority is fundamentally challenged?

Those who believe that the regime, or the bosses it defends, can be persuaded to “change heart” and institute democracy peacefully – to remove their fangs and become non-violent tigers – are living in cloud-cuckoo land.

In these circumstances, working people in struggle will have no alternative but to seek the ways and means to defend themselves against the regime – not only through organisation, but through armed organisation.

Those in the labour movement abroad who have seen the small glimpses of the struggles presently taking place in South Africa which are permitted them by the ruling class’s TV, and who have tried to put themselves in the shoes of the black workers and youth there, will instinctively understand that the movement is seeking the ways to arm itself as a mass against the brutality that it faces daily.

And yes, in the end, the apartheid regime will be overthrown only by the mass of the workers, organised and armed, in a “massive workers’ armed insurrection”.

This viewpoint, far from being “completely outside the spectrum” of mainstream opinion among the black masses in struggle, is already being foreshadowed in action.

The middle class ‘liberals’ in South Africa wring their hands, and engage in blanket condemnations of violence – the violence of the oppressed together with that of the oppressor.

But if the Labour Party NEC regards it as a “crime” to support the arming of the workers in South Africa – then what standpoint do they take? Do they believe in the possibility of a “peaceful solution” which will guarantee genuine democracy – one-person-one-vote in a unitary South Africa? Are they opposed to the mass of black workers and youth securing themselves the means to defend themselves against a vicious regime of racist oppression?

In the future, the British Labour Party will not be able to escape the reality that the choice for the mass movement in South Africa will be to organise the means of armed self-defence, or to face crushing defeats. It will be the responsibility of the British Labour Party to give every support to the oppressed black masses in this task.

While the NEC majority was arrogantly holding forth on what is in the “mainstream” and what is “completely outside” the mainstream of “progressive opinion” on South Africa – and while it was brazenly claiming the authority of the whole ANC for its own narrow right-wing views – it forgot to notice that a little change was taking place… in the public policy of the ANC.

How embarrassing! The ANC has now proclaimed, in place of its old reliance on guerrilla warfare, “an important shift of tactics towards a popular Iran-type insurrection.”[19] The task has been identified of preparing the mass movement for the armed overthrow of the regime.

We shall leave aside here the question whether the SA regime can be overthrown by the same method of revolutionary insurrection as toppled the Shah in Iran. The point is that the NEC majority has been caught with its pants completely down on this issue, and with the real nature of its famous “mainstream” naked for all to see.

Attack on Goals of Masses

In reality the NEC report is an attack on every fundamental goal and aspiration of the oppressed masses in struggle in South Africa.

Even in Britain, those who fall inside its “spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion” represent, at best, the extreme right-wing of the labour movement.

British workers will be astounded that the majority of members of the Labour Party NEC could have endorsed this report at all. In fact, if even the slightest serious attention had been allowed it on the NEC, what members of the Labour Party would expect is that those responsible for it would have been laughed at for political incompetence.

But perhaps the members of the NEC did not read it. Perhaps they rested on the understanding that what was contained in the report was – as the report implies – endorsed by the leadership of the African National Congress.

One thing is certain. Those struggling to build inside South Africa a mass ANC would be horrified were this the case. But, since this is the implication of the report, it is the responsibility of the NEC of the ANC to publicly dissociate itself from these positions, and from the witchhunt being launched by the Labour Party NEC against SALEP.

Unfortunately, however, there does exist within the ANC in exile a narrow right-wing clique clustered around the South African Communist Party. The SACP regards itself as the ‘custodian’ of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ – in reality, Stalinism – within the South African movement. In the name of this ‘Marxism-Leninism’, it puts forward the wholly utopian position that democracy can be achieved in South Africa without a struggle to end capitalism.

Up to the end of the 1950s – indeed, only months before the Sharpeville massacre – SACP leaders continued to maintain that a peaceful transition to democracy was possible in South Africa.

The ‘strategy’ of this ‘Communist’ Party, indeed, springs from the wholly opportunist belief that the ‘liberal’ capitalists and their representatives – in South Africa and in the West – must not be ‘alienated’, because they can be induced to support the ‘broad’ struggle against apartheid for a democratic society.

Hence they wish to bury the Freedom Charter’s demands for the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy; hence they fear the mass arming of the workers’ movement.

In the name of this strategy the South African Communist Party has not hesitated to oppose – and not only oppose, but slander, vilify, manoeuvre and use their bureaucratic power against – those who take the standpoint of the working class in South Africa.

Unfortunately, moreover, the SACP, in this, has been able to rely on their uncritical supporters and fellow-travellers within the labour movement in Britain and other countries around the world. SALEP believes that the misrepresentations and falsehoods contained in this report have the SACP and its supporters behind them.

SALEP believes also that the Labour Party will do not only the liberation struggle in South Africa but also its own reputation a tragic disservice by taking at their face-value the ‘facts’ and ‘arguments’ put forward by the South African Communist Party, or of its supporters within the ranks of the Labour Party itself.

The Struggle for Direct Links

If it is the case that exiled leaders of the ANC and Sactu are implicated in these charges against SALEP, it would not, unfortunately, be the first time that they have set themselves – under SACP influence – to try to mould Labour Party policy against the demands of the workers’ movement inside South Africa.

From the time when independent non-racial unions of black workers re-emerged in South Africa in the mid-1970s, a debate developed within the British labour movement on the most effective manner in which to support them.

From the beginning, the non-racial unions welcomed international labour movement solidarity and, as they built the strength to cope with the issue in practice, called for worker-to-worker contact at all levels to strengthen this support.

Despite this, for a number of years the ANC and Sactu leadership in exile completely opposed all direct links between trade unionists in South Africa and trade unionists abroad – as also, under their influence, did the leadership of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain.

Position of Unions Inside SA

The position taken by the democratic unions inside South Africa is reflected in the approach of the Federation of South African Trade Unions.

At its inaugural Congress in 1979 Fosatu resolved to:

…strive to establish and assist its affiliates in the establishment of international worker contact so as to create common rights and conditions of employment.

In a recent document (June 1984) Fosatu has spelled out this position more fully:

Fosatu believes in international worker contact in order to pursue the following goals.

1. To build international worker solidarity in the struggle against the economic, social and political oppression of workers.

2. To build effective worker organisation to counter and reduce the power of the multinational corporations (MNC’s).

3. To support workers struggles in other countries in whatever way Fosatu can.

4. To ensure that the institutions of the international trade union movement are not being used by anti-worker forces to create divisions and a loss of independence within the South African worker movement.

5. To assist in increasing the international condemnation of and pressure on the present racist regime.”

The position of the exiled leaders of the ANC and Sactu has been entirely different.

As recently as April 1982, Workers’ Unity, the official organ of ANC-controlled Sactu published an article headlined “DIRECT LINKS – STINKS!”

In a position paper submitted in 1982 to the Africa Sub-Committee of the Labour Party NEC, the African National Congress stated:

The call of the South African people for the total isolation of apartheid South Africa has been endorsed by the international community and is the policy called for by the United Nations, the OAU and the Non Aligned Movement. Any links with South Africa are a breach of that policy and exceptions inevitably weaken the case for such isolation. [Our emphasis.]

The British Anti-Apartheid Movement leadership, despite a struggle waged by many AAM members, has stood for the same position.

On 27 June 1981, in response to a call by an AAM-organised National Mobilising Conference of labour movement activists, the AAM National Committee stated:

…we do not feel that the AAM should assist in encouraging direct links between British and South African workers, when this is understood to mean the creation of international combine committees and exchange visits. [Our emphasis.]

Exiled Leaders Oppose Direct Links

What arguments have these ANC, Sactu and AAM leaders and their supporters in the British labour movement used to defend their opposition to direct links?

The April 1982 Workers’ Unity article is a representative example:

“They try to trick us with a new slogan ‘direct links’”, it states.

They say trade unionists from Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany and other capitalist countries should come to visit us in our South African prison and we should visit them in America or wherever.

The Special Branch stands at the gate of our prison – at the borders and at the airport. All who enter or leave are controlled and followed… It is true, not all who visit us are arrested but then we ask the question, why? It is because they are doing what the Special Branch wants them to do and are acting as a lead to us in the underground or because your reformism does not threaten the regime. Why do you visit us? It does us no good and puts us and our organisation in jeopardy.

It is difficult for some to refuse your invitations to America or Britain. But what can we learn there? What can the AFL-CIO teach us about revolution. We don’t need lessons in class collaboration…

‘Direct links’ are nothing more nor less than a new form of colonialism in which the far Left joins the far Right in opposing the Congress movement in South Africa.

For them, in other words, direct worker-to worker contact:

exposes the SA trade union movement to manipulation by visiting right-wing trade union leaders from the imperialist world;
exposes, to the police, revolutionaries in the SA trade union movement who meet visitors;
would, because of the control exercised by the regime, permit only “stooge” SA trade union leaders to make visits abroad.

In fact, the arguments of the exiled leaders, when boiled down, reveal an unfortunate lack of understanding of – even a contempt for – what has been involved in the magnificent rebuilding of trade unions against the brutal repression of the SA state over the last decade. They reveal a clear lack of confidence in the capacities, intelligence and vigilance of the democratically-constituted workers’ movement in South Africa in handling its own affairs.

On all the questions involved the democratic workers’ movement within South Africa has given its own clear answers.

Thus, at an AFL-CIO-organised conference in Washington in January this year, the President of the Council of Unions of South Africa – an organisation not in fact noted for being on the ‘far Left’ of the SA independent trade union movement – made it clear that CUSA “will not tolerate any kind of trade union imperialism”. On the platform with him as he said this were AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland and AFL-CIO International Affairs Director Irving Brown: they “sat staring straight ahead”.[20]

A group of American labour movement activists who visited the South African trade unions recently reported how, everywhere they went, they faced the same 15-minute series of questions from workers about who they were:

They couldn’t relax until they had asked their key question.

‘Are you connected to the AFL-CIO?’

As it turned out, they were not looking for ‘official’ credentials before they would talk openly. Just the opposite, in fact.

And yet there is hope: an eyewitness report on South Africa’s Labor Unions, American Labour Education Centre, No. 27, 1984

The African National Congress, in 1985, endorsed the visit of Senator Edward Kennedy to South Africa – a representative, not just of the class-collaborationist US trade union leadership, but of the ruling class itself. And yet they oppose genuine worker-to-worker contact!

Of course, both in the organisation of workers’ visits to South Africa, and in visits by South African workers abroad, risks are involved. But this is why the democratic trade unions within South Africa have laid down guidelines – such as those contained in the June 1984 Fosatu International Policy Statement – for how those visits should be organised.

The essential point in these guidelines is that the visits should be by invitation and arrangement with the democratic unions themselves, and under the vigilance and control of the organised workers within South Africa.

Workers who have had to fight every inch of the way to establish their organisations against bullets, baton charges, tear gas, bannings, murder and intimidation are perfectly capable of assessing and overcoming the risks involved in exchange visits.

Moreover, it is a gross insult to workers who have built the most democratic organisations South Africa has ever seen in the teeth of state repression to imply that their democratically-elected leaders are puppets of the regime.

If the Special Branch, which stands at the borders and the airports of South Africa – as well as in the mines, townships and factories – is unable to prevent genuine direct links, it is for the same reason that it is no longer able to prevent trade union organisation itself: because of the growing power, determination, organisation, and consciousness of the working class.

The ANC and Sactu leadership in exile has, to our knowledge, never condemned the international travel of United Democratic Front leaders, or Bishop Tutu, or even Chief Gatsha Buthelezi.

Yet they insist that workers’ leaders with passports are under the control of the regime. At a recent meeting in London, one such exiled spokesman had the effrontery to directly challenge a Fosatu shop steward for travelling on an SA passport: he was thereby, stated this “politician”, recognising the legitimacy of the apartheid regime.

The Fosatu worker, needless to say, had no difficulty squashing his arrogant accuser flat!

‘Fall-Back’ Position

Actually, against the contrary pressures from the workers’ movement within South Africa, the ANC, Sactu and AAM leadership in Britain have been unable to sustain the position of complete opposition to direct links which they started with. Recently they have adopted a ‘fall-back’ position. Direct links, they have argued, should take place only with the permission of the ANC and Sactu leadership in exile.

For a long time, the ANC, Sactu and AAM leadership argued that, since no genuine trade unionism could exist within the country openly, Sactu were “the only” representatives, the “only genuine messengers” of the South African working class.

While it has always been quite correct to support Sactu in any genuine work which it might undertake to assist the development of the trade union movement inside South Africa, these claims were quite impermissible.

Over twelve years, genuine trade unions have been rebuilt, almost solely as the result of the efforts of workers within South Africa itself. Some 500,000 workers are now organised in democratic trade unions inside the country. Most of these unions would wish to be spoken for only by their own democratically-elected representatives. Sactu-in-exile can in no way claim a right to exercise a veto on their activities – whether in building direct links or in any other way.

In recent years Sactu-in-exile has been forced to abandon its old fiction, of being the only ‘authentic’ organisation of the black South African workers.

But it has continued to claim that unionisation in South Africa has been the result of the work of its own “underground” activists. “Sactu is everywhere”, Sactu spokesmen have frequently claimed.

But now these claims are being tested. In recent months Sactu has in fact re-emerged openly within South Africa.

Sactu, states the Sunday Tribune:[21]

…has begun organising openly in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and PE… Lawyers point out that while the ANC is banned, Sactu itself is not banned although its leadership was arrested, banned or exiled along with the ANC.

This re-emergence takes place at a time when the overwhelming majority of the organised workers – in Fosatu, in CUSA, and in other unions including the Food and Canning Workers and the General Workers Union – are preparing to launch a new federation embracing hundreds of thousands of workers in the course of this year.

However it is not these unions that are associated with the re-emergence of Sactu. It is rather, states the same report, the SA Allied Workers’ Union, the Clothing Workers’ Union, the Domestic Workers’ Association and the Media Workers Association of South Africa.

Apart from SAAWU – which, unfortunately, has withdrawn from the discussions towards the establishment of the new federation – these other unions are small organisations.

It is certainly to be hoped that they do not intend to create divisions in the democratic workers’ movement by forming themselves into a rival minority federation.

But, whether or not this is the case, through this re-emergence Sactu reveals its actual forces and support on the ground – and completely undermines the claim of its exile leaders to be ‘the only’ representative of the South African black workers.

Nor is it correct that any veto over the activities of the democratic trade unions should be exercised by the ANC leadership in exile.

No trade unionist in Britain would accept the right of the Labour Party NEC to veto the decisions made by his or her trade union. Why should black South African workers, who are struggling for democracy against a vicious dictatorship, accept any external veto on decisions democratically reached in their own trade unions?

Without a doubt, among the members of these trade unions there are tens and even hundreds of thousands who see themselves as ANC supporters. But they take part as union members in the discussion and formulation of policy through the unions themselves – on the question of direct links or any other trade union matter.

So long as the ANC is exiled and illegalised, the rank-and-file ANC supporters in SA have no opportunity, in any event, to express their views on ANC policy in any organised democratic way through the ANC itself. All the more, therefore, must the democratic decision-making processes of the unions be taken seriously.

Labour Party Policy

For a considerable time, unfortunately, opposition to direct links was the policy adopted by many left-wingers in the British labour movement, under the pressure of the exiled ANC and Sactu leadership – and despite the position taken by workers within South Africa.

This is reflected in the letter we have already quoted, which opposed links between Ruskin College and the Institute of Industrial Education in the name of “total boycott” and on the grounds that “there can be no effective African working class organisation within the present repressive economic and political structure in South Africa”.[22]

While the re-emerging trade unions were still small, this position while still fundamentally mistaken, was understandable. However it became untenable in the light of the actual growth of the non-racial trade-union movement inside South Africa.

Because of the contradiction between the position taken by the exiled ANC and Sactu leadership and that taken by the democratic trade unions within the country, the Africa Sub-Committee of the Labour Party initiated, in 1982, an extensive investigation of the question of direct links, consulting directly with the unions inside SA.

Those on the committee who were under the influence of the South African Communist Party nevertheless continued to oppose direct links. But the eventual committee decision was to support the position taken by the democratic unions inside South Africa. This position was endorsed by the NEC and published as NEC Advice Note No. 7 (February 1983), “Labour Movement Relations with South African Trade Unions”.

Quite correctly, and despite the stated positions of the ANC and Sactu leadership in exile, the Labour Party arrived at its own independent decisions on the question, taking into account the broad interests of the working class movement within South Africa and internationally.

SALEP and Direct Links: The NEC’s “Charges”

The International Department report claims to uphold the NEC Advice Note No. 7 (February 1983): it “should continue as policy.”

At the same time it makes the astounding claim that SALEP’s policy regarding direct links is somehow entirely different:

SALEP’s new call for [undefined] direct links ‘at all levels’ is fraught with problems… No trade union Federation in South Africa, or the ANC, or the UDF, or Sactu, has called for direct links of the type SALEP suggests and has just organised.

But what is “new” or “undefined” about SALEP’s policy on direct links.

The idea is complete nonsense.

SALEP has, since its formation, not only consistently supported, but actively campaigned and fought for, the policy on direct links advocated by the democratic trade unions within South Africa themselves.

In fact, well before the formation of SALEP, several of its founders – including David Hemson, a banned and exiled organiser of the democratic trade unions in South Africa – had campaigned for this policy within the British labour movement.

Martin Legassick, another founder of SALEP, sat on the Africa Sub-Committee of the Labour Party NEC when it was investigating the question of direct links – and also fought for the position taken by the democratic trade unions inside South Africa.

In reality, the arguments used by the NEC to sustain its “Charge” are an attempt to smuggle in once again, through the back door, a policy of opposition to all genuine direct links.

Disguised Opposition

Why are we told that “the inexperience and indiscretion of participants in such ‘links’ may lay SA unionists open to immense security risks.”?

This argument, as we have explained, was laid to rest long ago – the only guarantees needed against this are that visits should be organised by the invitation of the democratic trade unions in South Africa and subject to their vigilance and control.

Why are we told that direct links “diverts resources” which could be “put to good use by campaigning at home.”?

The whole point of direct links is that they provide the opportunity for South African trade unionists to campaign directly for their case within the international labour movement – and for trade unionists from other countries, through visiting South Africa, to be better equipped to campaign for the case of the oppressed black workers in South Africa. It is on the basis of this direct exchange of understanding – rather than everything being filtered through a few official persons abroad who claim to speak for the South African workers – that common strategies and understandings to advance the cause of workers everywhere can be worked-out.

It is hardly coincidental that the leadership of the National Organisation of Labour Students should, at the same time that this report was being written, also attempt to resurrect the same old arguments.

In a newsletter circulated at their 1985 conference they assert:

…direct links in particular with trade unionists for example the NUM … is extremely dangerous bringing into risk trade unions in SA due to the repressive environment in which they operate and potentially playing into the hands of the right who also hardly surprisingly advocate direct links. Any such contacts should only be made through Sactu.

Miner Roy Jones’s Visit to SA NUM

What appears to have particularly upset the SA leaders in exile and their British supporters who are behind this report is the visit made in November-December 1984 by striking British miner Roy Jones to South Africa, at the invitation of the South African NUM, and with assistance from SALEP.

Roy Jones’s visit was warmly welcomed in South Africa by the workers, youth and women in struggle whom he was able to meet. It has been enthusiastically applauded by the rank-and-file British miners, Young Socialists, and trade unionists generally who have heard or read about it since Roy’s return.

The visit is recognised as a remarkable, and in some ways historic, success.

Why else should Roy have been able to bring back from impoverished black mineworkers the first-ever donation from a South African trade union to a strike fund in an advanced capitalist country?

Why else should Roy have been made the first white member of the South African NUM?

Why else should he be received so enthusiastically whenever he speaks at a labour movement meeting in Britain about the conditions and struggles of the black SA mineworkers? At a rally at which he spoke at this year’s LPYS conference alone, nearly £4,000 was pledged to build further links with the SA movement.

The International Department report takes an astonishing approach to this visit.

First of all, it falsely states that “SALEP can produce no evidence to show that Roy Jones was invited personally by the NUM SA.”

Yet the SALEP bulletin, in the hands of the International Department, contains quite clear evidence that Roy Jones was invited by the SA NUM.

Firstly, it reproduces a letter, signed by the President and General Secretary of the SA NUM, addressed to the President of the North Staffordshire NUM (Roy Jones’s area) which reads as follows:

We write to thank you for having given us a rare opportunity of being with Roy. It has been a real privilege and an honour for us to have him amongst our midst.

In our view Roy’s presence has helped to forge much stronger links between your union’s area and our union. We hope that eventually links will be formed between the entire British National Union of Mine Workers and a shining example of the British working class…

We look forward to your victory in your fight against pit closures.

Kindly accept our humble donation to your strike fund.

You are not alone!

If this was not sufficient to convince the International Department, they could hardly have overlooked the press clipping from the SA capitalist newspaper, the Rand Daily Mail,[23] also reproduced in the SALEP bulletin. “Mr Jones visited South Africa at the invitation of the local black National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)”, it states.

The main thrust of this article in the RDM, no friend of the South African workers’ movement, was to publicise the Chamber of Mines’ repudiation of Roy Jones’s views on black mineworkers’ conditions. Jones had “no credibility” they reported. Had Roy not been invited by the SA NUM, they would undoubtedly have seized the opportunity to say so.

The attack on Roy’s visit by the International Department and those on the NEC who endorsed this report plays right into the hands of the South African Chamber of Mines. But what is it about this visit that is found so offensive?

Let us look at the quotations from Roy’s account which the NEC report chooses to highlight as proof that the visit should not have taken place.

Roy said:

The message that I bring back from South Africa to the British NUM is that our struggle against pit closures must be carried on. We must keep on fighting until we’ve won. The black mineworkers in South Africa know that otherwise, their bosses in SA will feel their hand strengthened.

What finer message of international solidarity could have been transmitted by oppressed black mineworkers in South Africa to their brothers and sisters on the picket lines in Britain who – despite the failure of the right-wing leaders in the British labour movement to mobilise effective support for them – had already stuck-out the bitter strike for nine hard months?

Roy said:

It was a joy to stand and watch a pure worker-controlled union. No action by a leading member of the union would be possible without the full backing of the union membership first.

What worker in Britain, or anywhere else, will not be inspired by the determination with which black mineworkers in South Africa are seeking to build their union on the basis of the fullest democratic control by the membership?

Yet the Labour Party International Department, and the right-wing majority on the NEC, hate the ideas brought to the forefront by worker-to-worker direct links. It is not difficult to see why.

The report quotes a passage from an interview given by Roy to Izwilethu (which it describes simply as a “South African newspaper”, totally suppressing the fact that it is the official organ of the Council of Unions of South Africa, claiming a membership of 250,000 workers).

“He is not at all impressed with the role of the British Labour Party in the strike too, – ‘Their role is to work with capitalism’, he says bluntly. ‘Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock keeps his eyes on the opinion polls all the time and constantly panders to the right-wing of the establishment.’”

Of course Roy is partially misquoted: he was referring not to the role of the Labour Party as a whole, but to its right-wing leaders.

The International Department and the right-wing on the NEC oppose direct links like the Roy Jones visit not because this ‘endangers’ black workers in SA, but because it threatens to expose their own lame and class-collaborationist role before the SA workers; because it shows the distance between the right-wing ‘leaders’ and the fighting rank-and-file; because it arouses a sense of profound revolutionary solidarity between the black workers of SA and the militant activists of the labour movement in Britain.

Roy’s views quoted here are shared not only by thousands of British miners as a result of the strike, but by hundreds of thousands of other Labour Party members and trade unionists who were prepared to make real sacrifices in support of that strike.

For black workers in South Africa, British capitalism is the former conqueror and coloniser, and still the largest foreign investor in the country. It is a vital necessity for the black workers’ movement to work out its own views on who in Britain are and are not struggling against British capitalism, who are and are not their friends, on the basis of the views of all with whom they come in contact.

British NUM Attitude

The International Department report claims that Roy Jones’s visit was conducted “without the approval of the National (British) NUM Executive. Indeed, the NUM have ‘expressed disquiet’ about the organization of the visit and its objectives.”

Every striking member of the British NUM – let alone every member of the SA NUM – will be staggered at this statement.

What on earth could the leadership of the British NUM object to about this visit?

Not only did it serve to strengthen the links between British and South African mineworkers at a vital point in the history of mineworkers’ struggle in both countries – it actually led to the historic step of a financial donation from mineworkers in South Africa to the strike funds of the British miners.

Does the NUM Executive object to the message of solidarity – for victory in the struggle – which came back from the oppressed black mineworkers in South Africa?

Does the NUM Executive object to the criticisms of the right-wing of the British labour movement which were voiced by Roy during his visit – and which, incidentally, were raised on their own account in far stronger terms by the black South African mineworkers themselves?

Or is the “disquiet” of the NUM leadership confined to the bureaucratic argument that Roy did not have prior “permission” from the NUM Executive?

In fact Roy Jones had prior approval of the visit from his Area President. Moreover many striking miners from different areas went abroad from Britain during the strike to muster support – with great success – without obtaining prior approval from the NUM National Executive. Surely, particularly in the heat of a strike, such initiatives are only to be applauded.

But perhaps the NUM Executive “expressed disquiet” out of a sense of guilt that, unfortunately, they have not as yet given official recognition or adequate support to the South African National Union of Mineworkers.

The membership of the NUM will be surprised at this, and will call for the speediest reversal of this policy – but this is what is presently the case.

Once again, unfortunately, it is the underhand influence of the SACP leadership and Sactu-in-exile that lies behind this failure of the NUM Executive on a question of basic internationalist duty. For years the SA Stalinists have been persuading trade union leaders abroad to recognise and support none but themselves as the true representatives of all oppressed SA workers. Now that policy has come unstuck.

SALEP has campaigned, and will continue to campaign, for the maximum solidarity between the British and South African NUM’s.

“White European Experience”

The NEC report further criticises Roy Jones as follows:

Jones also gave an NUM SA Conference the benefit of his white European experience concerning the future evolution of the South African trade union movement:

‘I spoke about the strike in Britain and about the future role of South Africa’s NUM in the new trade union federation.’

Elsewhere they add:

The patronising and Euro-centric offer of ‘help’ may be totally inappropriate to South Africa’s black union circumstances.

“White European experience”. “Patronising and Euro-centric” offers of help?!

These mind-boggling remarks are a shameless insult to the experience stored-up within the international labour movement during its fighting history; an insult to the experience gained by every British miner in the course of the last strike; an insult to the striving of black workers in South Africa to break the bonds of apartheid and share in that international experience.

The remarks are filled with patronising disrespect for the frank and open manner in which workers, nationally and internationally, share experiences when they are unhindered by considerations of ‘prestige’ or bureaucratic gamesmanship.

They stand in stark contrast to the response of the President and General Secretary of the SA NUM, in the same letter to Roy’s Area President:

We learnt a lot from him and imparted not only our experiences but our lives as well to him.

The remarks suggest that those who compiled this report did not have the respect to understand the message of the Fosatu International Policy Statement (June 1984) – despite their selective quotations from it:

The worker struggle in South Africa can benefit greatly from the hard lessons learnt overseas… here in South Africa we must make use of this rather than try and learn it all again.

They insult also Roy Jones himself, who openly proclaimed the lessons he had learned from the SA workers, and whose report is filled with humility at the warmth and generosity with which he was welcomed, not only by the black mineworkers, but by workers, youth, and women in the black townships.

But, unfortunately, the International Department report takes this “point” even further.

SALEP has totally ignored the experiences of the trade union movements across Africa and none of its documents encourage ‘direct links’ with or acclaim the record of African trade unionists. Instead, the SALEP emphasis is on bringing a European influence to bear.

What is the ‘record’ and ‘experience’ of trade unions in Africa? Despite many heroic trade unionists, past and present, the trade unions in almost every African country have been brought forcibly under the control of the state. The majority of African trade union leaders are, unfortunately, little more than corrupt apologists for the shortcomings of one-party or military governments which, despite the aspirations of their people, cling to upholding the capitalist system.

The detention and torture by the Zimbabwe government of trade unionists campaigning against state-controlled unionism and for trade union democracy – which went totally uncriticised by the Zimbabwe trade union leadership – is only a recent example of what African governments will “permit” so far as trade unions are concerned.

Are these the ‘lessons’ which those who endorse this report wish to foist on the workers’ movement in South Africa: that it should fall under the control of the state?

In fact, SALEP, within the limits of its resources, has encouraged and assisted the building of genuine direct links among workers in different Southern African and African countries, and will continue to do so.

As the crisis in Africa deepens, more and more workers will turn to the task of building democratic trade unions under workers’ control, and rebuilding mass political organisations to struggle for democracy and socialism – and they will turn to each other in different countries to share the lessons of how to go forward.

Danger of Right-Wing Control

In reality, the “dangers” of “European experience”, of “Eurocentrism”, of “European influence” lie not in building genuine links among workers, but only in the influence that Western imperialism and capitalism and its representatives and supporters try to exert to divide and hold back the workers’ movement – particularly in the “Third World”.

In this connection there is one omission from the NEC report’s discussion of direct links – an omission which, when one thinks about it, is not surprising.

No mention whatever is made of the dangers of direct links becoming a ‘trap’ through which the right-wing of the labour movement can exert its influence. The only guarantee against this, as we have explained, is the vigilance and control of the organised workers within South Africa themselves. Nevertheless the issue is important to raise.

The manner in which the NEC report wants to limit the kind of direct links which are built leaves the door precisely open to the control of such links by the right-wing of the movement.

The report highlights, for criticism, Roy Jones’s call for further direct links to be built at rank-and-file level. Such a position, it claims, is at odds with Fosatu’s June 1984 International Policy Statement. That is untrue.

The report asserts further that SALEP, in its 1983-4 Annual Report, misuses this Statement because it “only partially quotes” it. Let us see who is really misusing the Statement!

What SALEP quoted was the following:

Fosatu accordingly believes that effective worker solidarity in the struggle against the MNCs depends on contacts at all levels [Our emphasis] – membership, shop stewards and the ITS [International Trade Secretariat].

Nothing could be clearer than this! Links at all levels! The rank-and-file level is one of those levels. Roy’s (and SALEP’s) call is perfectly consistent with the Fosatu position.

But, in another one of its brainteasers, the NEC report triumphantly proclaims:

What SALEP conveniently misses out is the following qualifying sentence:

‘Worker solidarity will not be built on the basis of contact at one or two of these levels only.’

Of course contact at all levels is needed. But what point is the NEC report making in labouring to set this sentence against the previous one?

The report tries to imply completely the opposite of what the Fosatu statement clearly intended – it implies that rank-and-file contacts are permissible only if they are bureaucratically controlled from the top.

The interests of ‘protocol’ are to take precedence over the interests of solidarity, according to the Labour Party NEC majority.

It is this which precisely opens the door to the regulation of direct links to serve the interests only of the right-wing of the labour movement.

Is the present leadership of the TUC – or of the ICFTU – to have a veto on what kind of direct links are built between British and South African workers – and on what forms of education are made accessible to oppressed black South African workers?

Isolate the regime!

The International Department’s report makes the further astonishing claim that:

The emphasis on ‘direct links’, to the exclusion of all other forms of activity agreed by Party Conference (even action against the import of South African coal) demonstrates SALEP’s disrespect … for the Party’s own decision-making body.

This is another completely false allegation, for which the report can provide no evidence.

In fact it completely ignores and suppresses SALEP’s actual position on these issues, spelled out for example in Profiteering from Cheap Labour.

It is, stated Profiteering:

…vital to build-up and strengthen the links between workers in different countries around their common interests.

Already there have been many excellent examples of such actions. British workers have blacked goods intended for South Africa in support of struggles by South African workers employed by the same company.

Such actions can become generalised by campaigning in the labour movement, in Britain and internationally, for effective economic sanctions against the South African regime. [Emphasis in original.]

In the course of such a campaign, it is vital that every group of workers taking action to isolate the apartheid regime should have the active support of the labour and trade union movement. In particular, victimisations and redundancies which might be attempted by employers in retaliation need to be resisted.

At the same time international links must be strengthened, which can most easily be done between workers employed by the same companies and struggling against the same bosses.

But the capitalist class internationally will refuse to abandon its interests in South Africa, and will use every means at its disposal to continue profiteering from the labour of the African workers. For this reason, in Britain and elsewhere, sanctions against the apartheid system can only be made absolute by the nationalisation, under workers’ control and management, of companies investing in South Africa.”

“SANCTIONS AGAINST CAPITAL! SOLIDARITY WITH LABOUR!” – this passage concluded.

SALEP stands by exactly the same position today.

Once again it must be pointed out that the NEC report claims to have been written on a mandate to “jointly determine the details of policy” with representatives of the ANC and Sactu.

Do these representatives oppose the visit made by Roy Jones to the SA NUM?

Do they – in the face of the SA NUM’s appreciation of that visit – denounce it as a “patronising and Eurocentric offer of ‘help’ … totally inappropriate to South Africa’s black union circumstances.”?

Do they oppose the decision of the SA NUM’s membership to make Roy the first white member of the union?

Do they oppose the donation given by the SA NUM membership to the strike funds of the British miners?

Did they support or oppose the call from black South African mineworkers to British miners on strike to “keep on fighting until we’ve won”?

What is their attitude to the shameful role – denounced by black SA mineworkers – played by the right-wing leaders of the British labour movement during the miners’ strike?

Do they believe it is more important for black South African workers to establish links with the state-controlled trade union officials in African states than with rank-and-file workers in Europe, Africa and elsewhere engaged in militant struggle?

Do they believe that direct links between workers in SA and overseas should be subject to the veto of right-wing leaders of the labour movement?

As with all the other questions raised by this report about the positions being put forward by exiled leaders in the name of the ANC and Sactu, the black South African masses and the labour movement internationally are entitled to an answer.

We call on the ANC and Sactu NECs to make clear statements on all these issues.

The NEC’s Other “Charges” Against SALEP

Enough has been said to demonstrate that the NEC report is not merely politically incompetent, but shows a readiness to ignore, suppress and falsify all evidence which does not fit in with its preconceived conclusions.

It is necessary, however, to take up some of the other distorted and falsified “charges” that are levelled against SALEP and reply to them briefly.

1. SALEP was set up by “a small group of white South African individuals”; it is “essentially little more than a … group of exiled white intellectuals.”

Not only is this false; the International Department well knew it to be false.

From the time of its foundation, SALEP’s members and supporters have been overwhelmingly black workers and youth in Southern Africa. SALEP, for obvious security reasons, has never published membership lists. But it had three publicly-named founder-coordinators.

One of them, David Hemson, is an exiled trade union activist’ in South Africa banned by the apartheid regime in 1975 – and recently arrested and detained by the Zimbabwe government, with other trade unionists and ZANU members, for campaigning to democratise trade unions and for organising socialist workers’ education. In the South African Star in March he was described as a “key figure in organising black trade unions in Natal in the 1970s.”[24]

The second, Martin Legassick, taught at Warwick University until 1981, when he resigned to work for SALEP. He has been a supporter and member of the ANC since he first worked for it in 1963. He served for eight years on the Africa Sub-Committee the Labour Party’s International Committee.

The third founder-coordinator was the late George Peake, a bricklayer by trade, and a trade union and Congress movement leader in South Africa from the 1940s. He was arrested in 1956 on charges of high treason along with 155 other Congress movement leaders, including Nelson Mandela. He was the first black prisoner on Robben Island this century, where he served, and quarried rocks, with Mandela. Going into exile, he became a UCATT convenor and a Labour Party Councillor in Britain.

Another prominent co-worker of SALEP’s is Nimrod Sejake, who was secretary of the Sactu-affiliated Transvaal Iron and Steel Union in the 1950s. He was also one of those arrested in 1956 for high treason. His work in building trade unions is warmly praised in Sactu’s official history, Organise or Starve – and, indeed, it is a photo of him (together with his then-assistant John Nkadimeng, the present General Secretary of Sactu) which appears on the book’s cover – addressing metal workers outside a factory.

The International Department was well aware of all these facts – yet all relevant information on the credentials of SALEP’s supporters, and all evidence showing black membership of and support for SALEP, is totally suppressed in their report.

Such conscious falsification alone is sufficient to discredit the whole NEC report. But matters go further than this.

Firstly, the International Department sent a researcher, one Julian Eccles, to interview SALEP representatives. One of those Eccles spoke with was a former SA black youth movement activist detained by the regime in the course of 1975 and 1976, and served with a banning order. This gets no mention either.

Secondly, Julian Eccles acted as a kind of security guard at the 1985 conference of the National Organisation of Labour Students (held on 2-3 March 1985) – which had on its agenda scurrilous resolutions attacking SALEP along the same lines as the (as-yet-unpublished) NEC report.

Mr. Eccles was among those responsible for policing the exclusion from this conference of SALEP members and supporters who wanted to present SALEP’s case. He can hardly have failed to see that those whom he was excluding were overwhelmingly black.

Yet the report systematically pictures SALEP as a “white” organisation! What is one to make of a ‘researcher’ who turns from ‘black’ into ‘white’ the evidence which is right before his own eyes?

Clearly this falsification was ‘necessary’, to attempt to lend credibility to the fiction that SALEP’s views were “completely outside the spectrum of mainstream progressive opinion”.

But the International Committee and NEC cannot escape responsibility for these falsifications either.

The facts on SALEP’s membership and support were drawn to their attention by members of the committees who opposed the ban on SALEP.

Moreover, none of the members of these committees could have been unaware that, since 1980, SALEP speakers, usually black, had spoken at labour movement meetings in their constituencies and in their trade unions up and down the country – roughly at the rate of two meetings a week.

Moreover, at the very same meetings of these committees at which the decision to proscribe SALEP was taken, there was clear evidence of the support present for SALEP among Southern African trade unionists, namely in Zimbabwe.

These meetings – in the case of both the International Committee and the NEC – had it on their agendas to consider the detentions, by the Mugabe government, of Zimbabwean trade unionists along with SALEP co-workers.

Yet, despite this evidence, the International Committee and the NEC endorsed a report characterising SALEP as a solely South African and “essentially” white organisation – and went ahead with their decision to proscribe SALEP!

2. On finance, the International Department report quotes figures to “show” that SALEP has an accumulated deficit of some £2,000, and continues, “SALEP says their debt is covered by indefinite loans from sources who ‘don’t want to be disclosed’. Asked why no full accounts were provided in the past, SALEP stated that they did not see it as relevant to the issues involved. SALEP is constitutionally bound to ensure all monies received are paid into a bank account which, SALEP claims, is currently ‘in the black’. SALEP, despite its purported educational aims, has no Charity Commission or other legal status. SALEP say only a ‘mutually agreed’ person may review their financial position ‘on their premises.’”

Yes, SALEP is constitutionally bound to ensure all monies received are paid into a bank account. Yes, this account is currently in credit, and is required by the bank to be so. No, SALEP has not applied for “Charity Commission or other legal status”.

Full accounts have always been provided to SALEP’s supporters and it is completely false to imply otherwise.

In addition, this is what SALEP wrote to the International Department regarding finances:[25]

…this is one of the areas of information which we have always protected very carefully. This is to ensure that there is no risk of the information (however indirectly or unwittingly) coming into the possession of the South African security police or anyone hostile to the workers’ movement in South Africa.

…our regular and committed donors have full, but confidential, access to our annual financial reports and are highly satisfied with our financial controls. If the International Committee has further questions about finance, we would be prepared for a mutually-agreed qualified accountant to view our annual financial reports on our premises. I should like these facts communicated to the International Committee.

What was in fact “communicated” to the International Committee was, to put it mildly, a deliberately distorted version of this statement, dripping with malicious innuendo ‘

It is also the case that SALEP has a certain accumulated ‘deficit’ which has been covered by indeifinite and interest-free loans from SALEP supporters. That they “don’t want to be disclosed” is for the same obvious security reasons spelled out in the above letter – but their willingness to offer this support shows their commitment to the aims and work of SALEP. The NEC report makes this appear something sinister!

Since SALEP was founded, our income has been a creditable £5,000 plus a year, on average, as a result mainly of pounds and pennies raised at labour movement meetings. We are encouraged to report that, since the witchhunt was first launched against us on committees of the Labour Party in October 1984, our flow of income has increased.

We look forward to continued and increased labour movement financial support, in order to allow us to fulfil the increased demands which are being made upon us.

3. “It is impossible to affiliate to SALEP. Individuals cannot take out membership of their own volition, as they can in CND or the Anti-Apartheid Movement. A supporter’s only hope of having a say in its affairs is by donating so much as to be approved by the Committee to attend the AGM.”

SALEP is not a British organisation like CND, and it is not a solidarity organisation like the Anti-Apartheid Movement. It is merely a modest education project working within the broad labour movement. It has no pretensions to a mass membership.

SALEP is, moreover, a Southern African organisation which, for obvious security reasons, is presently compelled to have its main office in Britain. Its actual membership is overwhelmingly Southern African – and consists, as the constitution says, of “any person who supports its objects and who is willing and able actively to participate in the work of the Project.”

Because the majority of SALEP’s members and supporters are scattered in different countries in Southern Africa, it is extremely difficult for a majority of them to ever meet in one single place. Naturally SALEP’s Annual General Meetings have to take account of this fact, and not take on a character which would disenfranchise the majority of SALEP’s members.

At the same time, since SALEP is run partly through the generosity of support which has been given it by the labour movement in Britain and other countries outside Southern Africa, we have felt it correct to invite regular and committed donors abroad to attend our Annual General Meetings.

It is a scandalous lie and insult, however – when our most regular and committed donors are workers living often at poverty level – to allege that “a supporter’s only hope of having a say” in SALEP’s affairs “is by donating so much as to be approved by the Committee to attend the AGM”.

4. SALEP was set-up by individuals when they were “unable to use the platform of Sactu’s newspaper and suspended from the ANC.”

Two of those who founded SALEP (David Hemson and Martin Legassick) were suspended – unconstitutionally and undemocratically – from the ANC in exile in 1979, along with two other comrades. But what was the background to these actions?

In January 1977 Sactu began publishing a newspaper – Workers’ Unity – for the first time since its leadership had gone into exile in the early 1960s. The newspaper was established mainly as an organising weapon for Sactu to initiate underground work in South Africa (which, in the preceding fifteen years and more it had signally failed to do).

But, after two years, there was no sign that Sactu was in fact becoming rooted among workers in struggle inside the country – and this was hindering the development of Workers’ Unity as a real workers’ paper. In fact the Editorial Board was becoming increasingly bogged down in conflict which reflected serious political differences on what the role and tasks of Sactu were.

In April 1979, as a contribution to discussion and resolution of these problems, the editor submitted a memorandum to the Sactu NEC which argued:

…that the cornerstone of Sactu’s approach to the revolution must be the recognition that economic gains, national liberation, and democracy, could be secured for the black workers only through an uninterrupted struggle to overthrow capitalism and begin the building of socialism; that the black working class is the only social force capable of leading the revolutionary struggle in the interests of all the oppressed, and, to undertake this task, must be organised first and foremost as workers; that the workers must be mobilised with the aim, at the decisive point, of defeating the armed force of the state with the revolutionary armed force of the mass movement.

The response of the Sactu NEC was not to discuss the issues involved, but to dismiss the editor from his post and from the Editorial Board of the paper. Subsequently, the NEC showed itself totally unwilling to discuss the political issues involved with other activists in exile and, to suppress discussion, closed down a Sactu sub-committee in London.

As they were allowed no means of airing the vital issues in discussion within the movement in exile, the ex-editor of Workers’ Unity and several other comrades sharing the same ideas, raised the arguments in a printed discussion document. For this, they were immediately suspended, without even a hearing, from the ANC. They all have, nevertheless, continued to support the ANC, and call for their reinstatement.

It was clear at the time that these bureaucratic actions were taken because of the political viewpoint put forward by these comrades – and that behind these actions lay the South African Communist Party clique dominating the ANC and Sactu in exile, who were opposed to the putting forward of genuine Marxist policies.

These facts have recently been confirmed by ANC spokesmen themselves. At a meeting organised by the African National Congress in London on 8 January 1985 Labour MP Dave Nellist asked the reasons why Marxists had been suspended from the ANC in 1979, and called for their reinstatement.

ANC spokesmen admitted that the suspensions were for political reasons, and stated that those involved could be reinstated only if they changed their political views! Moreover, they continued, the ANC was in ‘alliance’ with the South African Communist Party, and anything to do with Marxism was the province, and only the province, of the South African Communist Party.

Does the Labour Party NEC want to lend its support to these unconstitutional and undemocratic actions carried out by the South African Communist Party?

In fact the duty of the Labour Party is, side-by-side with the oppressed in South Africa, to support democracy within the SA liberation movement – and to support those putting forward positions from the standpoint of the working class.

5. “SALEP’s formation coincided with the establishment of the ‘Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC’ by SALEP’s co-ordinators and others.”

Were this “coincidence” true, what anyway would it prove? Why, any more or less than SALEP’s, do the political positions put forward in Inqaba ya Basebenzi, Journal of the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC, constitute ‘crimes’ warranting proscription from the Labour Party?

However, the fact is that SALEP is an autonomous organisation whose objects are set out in its constitution and demonstrated in the work that it has already undertaken.

The constitution states that SALEP’s objects are:

(a) to prepare and distribute material relevant to labour education and the related needs of working people;

(b) to contribute to, support and further, in any material way possible, any education work being conducted among the workers in South Africa;

(c) to aid, supplement, and assist existing trade union educational and training programmes being carried out by trade unions in South Africa;

(d) to carry-out, promote and encourage specific research on questions of practical relevance to the struggle of South African workers and their organisations;

(e) to publish in booklets, tapes, illustrated, audio-visual or any other form the results of research undertaken and any other educational material for the purpose of advancing the workers’ movement in South Africa;

(f) to examine, prepare and publish political and economic material relating to the experience, strategy, tactics and organisational methods of workers in South Africa, and the link between the struggles of South African workers and the workers’ movement internationally;

(g) to translate material of the Project for workers into African languages, Afrikaans and English;

(h) to do all that is necessary to carry out and further the work of SALEP and to obtain financial contributions for the achievement of all or any of the objects of the Project.

6. “SALEP and the ‘Marxist Worker’s Tendency’ despatch materials to South African addresses from London, frequently unsolicited. Many of the sources they quote, such as Lenin, are banned in South Africa and organizations and individuals found in possession of such materials can be heavily punished. Noteworthy too is the fact that the ‘Marxist Worker’s Tendency’ publication ‘Inqaba Ya Basebenzi’ is not banned and is openly sold on South African University Campuses and, with a Cambridge Heath imprint, has a South African ‘50 cents’ sale price on the masthead. All official ANC publications are banned.”

These allegations reveal profound political ignorance of the actual state of affairs in SA as regards censorship in practice.

In reality, SALEP publications, as well as those of community groups, students, the ANC, Sactu, and the Marxist Workers’ Tendency of the ANC, have been banned.

But the mere formal fact that the regime bans publications does not of itself prevent them from circulating in the country, clandestinely or semi-openly. For the same reasons that the apartheid regime finds it impossible to crush the mass movement, it cannot fully impose its aims of banning and censorship. The regime’s police cannot be everywhere at once – not even on the university campuses.

To lessen the risks involved to individuals using its material, however, SALEP has deliberately avoided the use of quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin etc. in its publications. We challenge the International Department to find a single such quotation in a SALEP publication!

Moreover, is the International Department unaware that the trade union, community, etc. press inside SA is constantly testing and pushing back the bounds of censorship – to the extent of publishing extensive material on the Freedom Charter, the ANC and Sactu, and the nature of capitalism? The thirst of the black workers and youth for revolutionary ideas pushes constantly in this direction. SALEP welcomes every advance which is made of this kind as a result of the forward movement of the workers.

So far have things gone that the regime itself has been obliged to lift its ban on the Freedom Charter – and, in the recent period, has actually ‘permitted’ the capitalist press to quote extensively from such leaders as Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo.

The Labour Party NEC report simply trades on supposed ignorance of these facts in Britain, hoping to convey to the labour movement an impression that SALEP (simultaneously!) is reckless on security and enjoys the favour of the SA regime! Both of these smears are utterly false, and are cynically put forward for the malicious purposes of the Stalinists and the right-wing.

7. “Allowing such publications to circulate freely in South Africa is consistent with the regime’s aim of sowing as much public dissent in the liberation movement as possible, thereby weakening it and reducing its credibility with the people.”

This allegation – as well as another assertion in the document that SALEP (and Inqaba) were set up to “undermine the liberation movement” – is a dirty slander in the time-honoured tradition of Stalinism, which cannot honestly debate ideas. (We might as well say that the NEC’s attempted suppression of SALEP is ‘consistent’ with the SA regime’s aim of suppressing socialist workers’ education!)

If the NEC report had the courage to spell out the implication of these statements openly, it would be that SALEP (and/or Inqaba) are agents of the apartheid regime.

That was in effect the slander made (under the influence of Stalinists) by one of the National Organisation of Labour Students leaders, one John Mann, at a Labour Party Youth Sub-Committee meeting when the issue of SALEP first came up there. Faced with a letter from SALEP’s solicitors, he had to retract this allegation, describing it as “ludicrous”.

Now the International Department report – written, ‘coincidentally’ by another ex-student in the camp of the NOLS leadership – seeks to reintroduce the same allegation in revised form.

This is worthy of as much contempt as the ‘explanation’ by the Zimbabwean Minister of Information as to why he had detained trade unionists, ZANU members and SALEP co-workers – all socialists. It was, he implied, because they were in fact seeking to install in Zimbabwe a reactionary neo-colonial regime!

In the same vein the International Department report has the stupid effrontery to criticise members of SALEP as “very fundamentalist Marxists”, and at the same time imply that they are serving the interests of the regime.

These are the same methods as those of the capitalist gutter press who describe Arthur Scargill as a fascist – and of Stalinism at its height which assassinated Trotsky with the accusation that he was a ‘fascist agent’.

What lies behind all such slanders is the fear – common to the capitalist class and the Stalinist bureaucracies of Russia, Eastern Europe etc. – of a growing workers’ movement grasping the Marxist ideas which can guide it in the struggle to eliminate all forms of elitism, bureaucracy, and oppression – the struggle for workers’ democracy and socialism.

Members of the Labour Party will be ashamed to find their NEC associating itself with these Stalinist methods of ‘argument’.

8. “Allegations of their [SALEP’s] links with Militant are confirmed by total agreement of political analysis on all questions. SALEP and the Marxist Workers’ Tendency both use Cambridge Heath Press for typeset print work… In the last few years the only newspaper to encourage their work has been ‘Militant’, and their most prolonged support comes from the LPYS.”

Were all this the undistorted truth, it would in no way justify the decision to proscribe SALEP from the Labour Party – any more than the political views put forward by supporters of the Militant newspaper justify actions by the Labour Party leadership to engage in witchhunts or expulsions against them.

But what is the nature of the evidence presented for this allegation?

(a) That the “only” newspaper to encourage SALEP’s work has been Militant. As we have pointed out in this pamphlet, SALEP’s work and publications have been commented upon favourably in numerous publications, both in SA and the labour movement in Britain.

(b) That SALEP publications, as well as Inqaba ya Basebenzi, are published on the same press as Militant.

SALEP, like many other labour movement publications – including constituency Labour Parties, Trades Councils, etc. – has its materials published by Cambridge Heath Press on a commercial basis. From them we get a cheap and efficient job.

For the International Department to have proved such a point in full would have taken considerable labour! But perhaps the report means that both SALEP and Militant stand, within their respective spheres of work, for the interests of the working class internationally, and for democracy and socialism. To this SALEP pleads guilty.

In fact it is to the credit of Militant – and a demonstration of the commitment of this newspaper to socialist education and links with workers abroad – that it has supported the work of SALEP.

In the same way it is to the credit of the Labour Party Young Socialists that the “most prolonged support” for SALEP has come from them.

But the report, characteristically, suppresses other evidence of SALEP’s support of which its compilers were well aware.

SALEP is officially supported not only by the Labour Party Young Socialists, but by the Labour Party Women’s Conference. It has received support and encouragement from Labour Party constituencies and wards, from trade union branches, from trades councils, etc. up and down Britain – and in other countries as well.

Left-wing Labour Party leaders also support SALEP, including Tony Benn, who has written:

The South African Labour Education Project has established itself with strong support from the Labour Movement in Britain to bring together the experience in lessons of Socialist Trade Unionism in Britain and in South Africa to assist in the struggles there.

I hope it is strongly supported in this country where we have a lot of experience that we could put at the disposal of the South African working class as well as giving strong political support to help them in their liberation struggle.”

Labour Party members, and the labour movement generally, should endorse these remarks – and redouble their support for the liberation struggle in South Africa and for SALEP.

They should not be deterred by an NEC report which shows a remarkably “total agreement of analysis on all questions” between… Stalinists and the most conservative elements of the Labour Party right-wing.

The Tasks for the Labour Party

The proscription of SALEP by the majority on the Labour Party NEC, it is unfortunately but clearly the case, is motivated by a hysterical bureaucratic vendetta against Marxist ideas in the South African workers’ movement being orchestrated by the leadership clique of the Communist Party. It is being carried out by those who, wittingly or unwittingly, are prepared to act as a mouthpiece for the CP’s policies and interests in the British labour movement.

Unable to halt the increasing turn towards the ideas and methods of Marxism among the organised workers and youth inside South Africa, they have instead entered an ‘unholy alliance’ with the right-wing of the British labour movement in a futile attempt to witchhunt criticism of South African capitalism and Western imperialism.

The British Labour Party NEC listens to the voices of the SACP leaders in exile and their supporters as “spokesmen” of the South African movement at the cost of tragically failing in its internationalist responsibilities of maximum solidarity with the struggle in South Africa for democracy and socialism.

It is absolutely correct for the British Labour Party to support the African National Congress – as well as the democratic trade unions – as the instruments which the oppressed need to build as the mass movement under the leadership of the organised working class.

But it would be wholly incorrect – and would play into the hands of the Stalinist minority who seek to bureaucratically control the South African liberation struggle – for this support to be uncritical.

If the British Labour Party is to “jointly determine the details of policy” with an ANC and Sactu leadership in exile dominated by the policies of the South African Communist Party – is it thereby to applaud blindly every action taken in the name of the SACP’s strategy of guerrillaism?

Support for bombings?

Is the British Labour Party thereby committed to endorsing the Pretoria car bomb explosion, which killed 18 people and injured 217, many of them black workers?

Would it thereby become committed to endorsing a method of struggle in South Africa which it whole-heartedly condemns when used in Ireland and Britain by the IRA?

Let us make no mistake about this: there is no parallel between guerrilla methods in South Africa and peasant-based wars of colonial liberation.

Not only is guerrillaism, in the industrialised conditions of South Africa, with the power of the SA military machine, a totally unviable strategy for power. Not only do military actions conducted by small groups isolated from the mass movement serve to distract the oppressed in struggle from a consciousness of their own power.

In addition, the methods of guerrillaism will inevitably evoke not simply continuing escalated counter-revolutionary repression by the state, but the reactionary terrorism of groups of armed whites.

A spiral of white terror, and black guerrilla response, would eventually put the slaughter which has taken place in Northern Ireland over the last decade in the shade – and in the end would lead to a horrific racial civil war from which neither black nor white could emerge as winners.

Civil war, as we have explained, cannot be avoided in South Africa – but it will achieve democracy and socialism only if fought on class lines.

In reality, it is only if the movement of the black masses advances a non-racial programme for workers’ democracy and socialism – for the destruction of white privilege along with all class privilege, and for the sharing out of a wealth massively increased by the expansion of production in a planned economy – that in time the whites can be won over from reaction, and the social support of the regime and the ruling class undermined.

The British Labour Party, and all socialists and internationalists, have the responsibility of arguing this case within the South African movement, and of supporting those who are putting forward this position.

Support for Stalinism?

If the Labour Party is to “jointly determine the details of policy” with the SACP-dominated exiled leadership of the ANC and Sactu – is it thereby committed to the full support they have given to the methods of Stalinist totalitarian regimes?

The leadership of the ANC-in-exile, scandalously, under SACP influence, was the first body to send a telegram of support to the Russian bureaucracy when it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush a movement of the workers seeking an end to bureaucracy, and genuine workers’ democracy and socialism.

The leadership of the ANC in exile, scandalously, under SACP influence, has echoed the Polish bureaucracy’s slanders against Solidarity – that this movement of millions of workers also struggling for workers’ democracy and socialism was an instrument of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The revolutions in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Mozambique, in Angola have represented in their time historic advances – because they overthrew capitalism. But, whether from the start, or through bureaucratic counter-revolution, their nationalised and planned economies are ruled by monstrous totalitarian bureaucracies, repugnant to workers in the advanced capitalist countries struggling for democracy and socialism.

The oppressed masses in South Africa, who have suffered under a horrible racial dictatorship throughout this century and earlier, aspire to genuine workers’ democracy and socialism – and despise the privilege and elitism of bureaucrats.

The Labour Party has a duty to support them in this struggle, and to criticise all those who stand in its way.

On the question of direct links, the Labour Party showed that it was possible to have differences with the policies of the ANC leadership while still committing itself to support for the ANC.

The Labour Party can take the same position with regard to the methods of guerrillaism, to the question of Stalinism, or, for that matter, on the question of SALEP.

The struggle of the oppressed black South African masses against the most formidable regime in the capitalist world, will go down in history as one of the most magnificent international achievements of the working class.

In the last twelve years, spearheaded by black workers and youth, that struggle has scaled ever-newer heights.

The upsurge in 1984-85 – in small towns as well as the major cities – has marked a new watershed in that struggle, and signals with absolute clarity that South Africa has entered an epoch of revolution.

Workers everywhere around the world can gain strength and encouragement from the courage and determination shown daily by black workers, youth, and women in struggle in South Africa – not bowed but only further angered by the massacres, torture and violence which is the only response the South African ruling class can offer.

The struggles that still lie ahead in South Africa, before apartheid and capitalism are finally ended, will be bitter and, unfortunately, bloody ones – but ones in which the black South African masses, because they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, will FIGHT AND FIGHT AND FIGHT AGAIN, will ORGANISE, ORGANISE AND ORGANISE AGAIN, until every chain which binds them is finally smashed.

Unafraid, they will take on, challenge, and defeat, not only the Chamber of Mines, but the multi-national monopolies of Britain, the United States, West Germany, etc. within SA – and they will bring them under their own democratic control and management.

At the same time they will take on, challenge, and defeat the monstrously repressive apartheid regime – and replace it with the democratic rule of the working class.

Because it will provide the only answers, they will turn in their thousands and then their millions to the ideas, the perspectives, the programme and the methods of Marxism which are the historic legacy of the working class in every country, as a guide in the struggle for democracy and socialism.

The workers’ movement in South Africa – and the fighting movement of all the oppressed – stretches-out the hand of brotherhood and sisterhood to the labour movement around the world in the common struggle to bring to an end all oppression and exploitation everywhere.

Every British Labour Party member committed to socialism, every British labour movement activist, every worker in struggle around the world, will share in those aspirations and want to make them part of his or her daily practice.

SALEP members and supporters, within the limits of our resources, are proud to be participants in this struggle, and are committed to continuing our work of socialist education and building direct links until the struggle is concluded in victory.

We are encouraged by the fact that, since the formation of SALEP in 1980, the demands for our work within the Southern African labour movement, and the support for our work in the labour movement internationally, have increased tremendously.

No arbitrary banning by the Labour Party NEC – no attacks from the South African Communist Party and its supporters – will hamper or deter us from this work. Nor will it diminish, but only increase, the support for our work within the labour movement internationally.

The NEC’s report, and its decision to attempt to proscribe SALEP, are a disgrace which will do the reputation of the Labour Party immense harm – not because this decision is an attack on SALEP, but because it is a mindless attack on all the finest aspirations of the movement of the oppressed in South Africa.

We are confident that the ranks of the British Labour Party and British labour movement, with whom we struggle shoulder-to-shoulder, will ensure the rapid reversal of this unwarranted witchhunt against SALEP, and provide increased support for SALEP’s work.

Also, we believe, they will draw from what has happened vital lessons as to how to go about giving the most effective support to the movement of the oppressed in South Africa – which seeks to build the democratic trade unions and the African National Congress as the means to organise for workers’ democracy and socialism.

May 1985

Appendix: South African Labour Education Project Appeal

As trade unionists in this country will readily agree, workers’ education is a vital aspect of trade union and political organisation.

In South Africa it is even more vital. Legislation proposed by the South African government, following the report of the Wiehahn Commission, is aimed at forcing African trade unions to register with the Department of Labour. The intention is to bring hitherto independent trade unions more tightly under state control. This aspect of the Wiehahn Commission’s proposals has rightly been focussed on by the trade union movement and solidarity organisations internationally.

Another aspect of the Commission’s proposals which has not been emphasised to the same extent concerns workers’ education. As well as imposing controls on the African trade unions through registration, the regime intends to limit independently organised workers’ education projects and to place stringent controls on the material produced by trade unions and other bodies in South Africa for this purpose.

In spite of the South African regime’s intention to repress meaningful education involving workers, such education will undoubtedly continue, under clandestine conditions if necessary.

The South African Labour Education Project (SALEP) has recently been established to support and further the work of trade union and political education and organisation among the workers of South Africa. Its membership consists of individuals who have collectively gained considerable experience both in the labour movement in South Africa and in the field of economic, political and trade union research. Its purpose is to produce material, prepared from the working class point of view, for use by the workers’ movement in South Africa and also by the labour movement and solidarity organisations abroad.

In the conditions of South Africa, the importance of workers’ education can scarcely be exaggerated. The most highly industrialised country in Africa has one of the highest illiteracy rates. Some fifty per cent of African people over the age of fifteen can neither read nor write. The majority of African workers have not had the opportunity to complete primary school education. The present generation of African working class youth, the first to receive high school education, suffer the terrible disabilities of poor facilities, lack of teachers and over-crowded classrooms. The Soweto uprising of 1976 was the revolt of this new generation against the deprivation of educational opportunities and against the entire system of repression and exploitation in South Africa.

SALEP is not intended as a substitute for the work of education and training which will be carried on by the trade unions on the shop floor in South Africa. It is intended to supplement this work whose scope the regime is constantly narrowing.

Nor can a project launched in London in any way take the place of educational work carried on, person to person, among the workers in South Africa. But the Project can make an important contribution in supporting such work in South Africa, by providing basic materials, both written and oral, and through the appropriate research. This contribution is all the more necessary because none of the existing organisations potentially able to carry out such work has so far given it any systematic attention.

The Project will concentrate its efforts on the production of booklets, tapes and other material dealing with questions which cannot easily be tackled in open work by the trade unions in South Africa. Because of the high rate of illiteracy, tapes and illustrated material will be important aids. The Project has the capacity to produce material written and oral, in African languages, Afrikaans and English.

The Executive Council has already sent a donation of £50 to support the Project. Donations from individual members, Chapels and Branches should be sent to the General Secretary at Head Office, and made payable to the South African Labour Education Project.

Reprinted from NATSOPA Journal and Graphic Review, Volume 10, No. 9, October 1980.

AVAILABLE FROM SALEP:

We Live Like Dogs: conditions and struggles of the black SA mineworkers

Video or slide-tape; length about 30 minutes.

Labour Party women’s sections and YS’s: £10 to hire, £20 to buy. CLP’s, trade unions: £20 to hire, £30 to buy.

British and SA mineworkers must unite!: report on NUM member Roy Jones’s visit to SA NUM

A gripping account of the working and living conditions, and the demands, of black mineworkers, youth, etc. in struggle in South Africa today.

Price: 20p plus postage.

Asinamali! (“We have no money”)

How wages and profits are formed, the importance of the struggle for a national minimum wage linked to rises in the cost of living, and how to answer the bosses’ arguments against wage increases.

Price: 25p plus postage.

SALEP T-shirts Design as on the cover of this pamphlet. Available in large medium, and small sizes. , Price: £3 plus 30p postage. Orders to: Southern African Labour Education Project, 28 Martello Street, London E8. 01-241-0434

[1] Constituency Labour Parties – MWP, 2020

[2] 3 May 1985

[3] See Guardian, 3 May 1985

[4] Financial Mail, 16 November 1984

[5] International Confederation of Free Trade Unions – MWP, 2020

[6] Financial Mail, 23 November 1984

[7] 11 August 1980

[8] 8 August 1980

[9] 8 August 1980

[10] December 1980

[11] Financial Times, 9 September 1981

[12] Fosatu Worker News, October 1983

[13] Reported in Saawu’s paper, The Worker, October 1984

[14] Star, 2 May 1985

[15] 26 March 1985

[16] 21 April 1985

[17] Rand Daily Mail, 28 February 1985

[18] Sunday Express, 11 November 1984, quoted in an ANC News Briefing. (Our emphasis)

[19] Guardian, 10 May 1985

[20] Labor Notes, February 1985

[21] 17 March 1985

[22] Guardian, 22 March 1975

[23] 19 December 1984

[24] 17 March 1985

[25] 23 January 1985

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