BEHIND THE BLACK REVOLT
The uprising in Soweto, South Africa, was brutally repressed on June 16 and 17, with more than 100 Africans murdered. But the toiling mosses were neither intimidated nor demoralized by the attack on the vast ghetto of more than 1 million African workers and their families just outside Johannesburg. In fact, the protest, which began as a struggle against the Bantu education policy of the racist regime, quickly spread to nearby Alexandra Township, famed for a mass boycott of apartheid buses during the second world war, then to the Mamelodi location, a cheap labor camp near Pretoria, and then to two Transvaal Bantu "homelands, " rural reservoirs of cheap labor, and one in Zululand, where students also revolted against Bantu education. The rebellion was quelled by one of the world's most concentrated totalitarian states, but it had affected some 3 million semi-migrant, semi-settled proletarians around the gold mining Witwatersrand. These proletarians lack even the semblance of rights, denied the life of a settled urbanized working class or a stable rural peasantry. They stand at the hub of the gold mining industry of world imperialism. The June revolt was the most serious uprising in a long history of class struggle against the Anglo-Boer system of racial discrimination known as "apartheid. " There has been no lack of mass revolt against this system: Natal in 1906, a general miners strike followed by massocres in Queenstown (the Cape) and Bondelzwartz (Namibia) soon after the first world war, the Marabastad (Transvaal) struggle and the miners strike in 1946, the battles in Witzieshoek (Natal) after the second world war and Sharpeville and Langa in 1960. But this was the first massacre of a mass rebel -lion against the Boer policy of "retribalization, *which is part of the entire West European policy sponsored by Catholic and Social Democratic "Africanists" since the war. In this sense, it was the first significant anti-Western rebellion, and Vorster duly crushed it in the name of the West. While the massocres in the locations were going on, Vorster held meetings with Henry Kissinger in Bavaria south africa! •by LANGAO and Helmut Schmidt in Bonn. The site of these meetings was appropriate, for West Germany is South Africa's First trading partner (if gold is excluded; otherwise Britain is first) and has investments in the apartheid state to the tune of $2, 000 million, including a special deal on fissionable raw material. The West German regime acted as spokesman for the entire Common Market, on the basis of the EEC Council and "parliament" resolutions of April 1976, These resolutions effectively supported apartheid by deliberately omitting (as did Kissinger's statements in Nairobi) any reference to "majority rule" in South Africa. At the same time, in Bavaria and Bonn, as well as in the United Nations meeting on Soweto, the entire bloc of imperialist states made it clear that they would not stand for "sanctions" agains! South Africa. This is, of course, not surprising, for a genuine boycott of South Africa would represent the "foreign policy" of the anti-imperialist, anti-apartheid class struggle in South Africa itself, the external application of the proctice of the internal mass movement: non-collaboration with Herrenvolkism. It would thus involve the extension of the internal class struggle against U.S. and EEC imperialism, guarantor of the apartheid bastion. Origins of South African racism The racial colony of South Africa was a special product of the development of European colonialism in its interaction with precolonial societies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Broadly speaking, this inferaction took three different forms: a) The North American or Australian road, whereby the colons were settled on lands whose tribal, communal owners were dispossessed and often massacred. Here primary accumulation took a genocidal form and the cheap-labor basis of colonialism was eradicated. b) The "Indian" road, taken in countries in which the European invaders found strong indigenous classes and ruled through the native ruling classes, transforming them into tribute collectors, compradors, and finally, under "independence, " junior dependent
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SOUTH AFRICA partners and managers of the semicolonial state, c) The rood pursued in Brazil, the southern part of what is now the United States, and South Africa, where the decimation of the indigenous population was combined with massive importation and exploitation of slaves, while the pastoral or agricultural societies (for example, the Khoi-Khoin and Bantu in southern Africa) were broken down and inserted into a system of racist "indirect rule" through chiefs. With the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, ex-slaves and serfs evolved into a racially regimented layer of cheap wage-laborers. Thus emerged the color-bar society. in the total absence of real or potential pre-existing local exploiting classes, the white population became the social base and agency of colonialism. This third road took its sharpest form in South Africa. After a period of capitalist plantation slavery under Holland (1652-1795 and 1802-06) and Britain (17951802 and from 1806 on), British monopoly capital, backed by massive British, Dutch, French, German, and later Jewish immigration, created a racist state. Throughout the period of the rise of imperialism from 1860 to 1900, the economic base was provided by Natal sugar, Kimberly diamonds, and Johannesburg gold. The mining revolution occurred amidst rapid territorial conquests, on extension of the reserves (retribalized rural Bantustans as reservoirs of cheap labor), and the establishment of compound locations ringing urban areas (concentration of migrant laborers and semi-migrant, partially settled families); in addition, there was imported white labor. The rapid expansion of capital from Europe on the basis of the exploitation of dispossessed cheap African labor with no rights, backed up by an iron alliance of white labor and capital against non-European labor, led to the first significant fusion of monopoly capital with the capitalist state. South Africa's white "democracy" was rooted in totalitarian rule over an internal "black colony" that included the majority of the population. The cheap labor centers, nuclei of colonial superprofits, were the real sources of the racist state, racism, and racial prejudice.
Cheap labor, superprofits The roots of apartheid have never resided in the psychosis of racial mystique. Their origins lie plainly and simply in the need to extract immense profits from the superexploitation of cheap labor. In South Africa, however, labor has been kept cheap not simply by the self-regulating processes of capitalism, such as the reserve army of unemployed. On the contrary, ever since the mining revolution began a century ago, there has been a chronic shortage of labor, combined with an excess of capital. H.F. Oppenheimer points to a labor shortage and capital excess in nearly all yearly reports, including 1976. The South African labor reserves were never sufficient for the labor needs of monopoly capital, which had to BUTIE THEY CANT PEAD AFRIKAAN'S HƠN CAN THEY READ THE KEEP OUT NOTICE? BLANKES ALLEEN scour beyand the Limpopo River (north of South Africa), and even beyond the Zambezi (north of Rhodesia), deep into Africa as far as the equator, in its search for cheap labor. North of the Bantustans and protectorates, Britain established a vast network of reserves from which to recruit cheap labor for the mining-finance hub of the South African economy. At present, according to London Stock Exchange quotations, the market capital of South African mines (excluding banking, insurance, construction, and industrial and commercial investment) amounts to approximately 514, 000 million. All this was built up by cheap African labor, the profits from which were directly and indirectly ploughed back to create the world's most massive and concentrated single monopoly structure, or multinational mono-industry. The total EEC stake in the South African economy is on the order of $30, 000 million (the U.S. share is only about 12 percent). This capital has an insatiable appetite for cheap labor, which means African labor. Through Cecil Rhodes's Recruiting Corporation and its partner, the Native Affairs Department (now renamed the Bantu Affairs Department), European capital turned most of Africa south of the Sahara into a cheap-labor hinterland. This forms the labor base for the as yet unofficial but nonetheless very real South African Common Market. At first, the labor reservoirs for this market consisted of the Bantustans and protectorates, the Portuguese colonies, the
former German colonies, Rhodesia, British West and East Africa, and even the former Belgian Congo. Despite the fact that most of these states have since become independent, they have continued to supply cheap labor to South Africa. The economic domination of these states by Anglo-South African capital has likewise continued, especially in mining, plantations, and cash-crop production. (In July 1965, when a motion to nationalize South Africa's vast holdings in Kenya was made by Kenyan parliament members and senators, Jomo Kenyatta rejected the motion, saying, "We are not thieves. " Thus, the robbed are called robbers when they try to recover their own property.) Every South Africon regime, from General Smuts (the major architect of apartheid) to Herzog to Malan to Strydom to Verwoerd and now to Vorster, has supervised this process of dragging the cheap labor net across most of southern and central Africa, The "détente" policies of the Vorster regime today have an economic history behind them. Part of this history lies in the character of African "independence" os a cheap-labor reserve. The South African Common Market The major stakes of imperialism in South Africa are as follows:
1) More than 530, 000 million of Western capital, the bulk of it from Common Market countries. There are financial and mining links between South Africa and Britain (the City would collapse without South African gold, diamond, and other mines), France (including an arms trade), Germany (which would like to see Namibia accede to "independence" in order to be able to dominate the territory through Germany's old mineral, industrial, commercial, and farming interests there), Holland, and the United States. EEC and OECD statistics indicate that in the early 1970; annual rates of increase in trode with South Africa were as follows: USA 15%, Holland 42%, France 48%, Germany 24%, Belgium 40%, Italy 16%, Switzerland 22%.
2) South Africa accounts for almost half of all industry in Africa. The industrial starvation of Africa is a characteristic of colonialism,
3) South Africa supplies about one-fourth of Africa's free on board export values and absorbs about one-fourth of Africa's c.i.f. (cost, insurance, and freight) import
4) South Africa supplies three-fourths of the Westem world's gold requirements (bullion and industrial). Without this supply, there would be a total collapse of the monetary system of the OECD countries.
5) South Africa is a major source of uranium for the West's atomic industries, including the arms industry.
6) South Africa is the West's white base against AFrica's struggle for real independence and democracy. The Western strategists do not see the "independence" trick as a workable alternative to apartheid. Since the only real alternative is another Vietnam or Cuba, they have long since resolved to retain the essential substance of apartheid, changing only its "structural relations" with the internal and external hinterland.
Such are the basic features of the South African Common Market, upon which Western strategy has been based. After the second world war, in the context of the shifts in the world relationship of forces and the rise of independent states, first in Asia and then in Africa, there was a reappraisal of imperialist strategy. The latest instrument of this strategy is "dialogue" and "coexistence." Imperialism's new 'grand strategy' The imparialist powers survived the postwar crisis by granting "independence" to the African colonies, Black managers were installed to look after white estates, and unprecedented superprofits flowed into Western European and North American banks; unprecedented wealth was congealed in the form of spirally expanding Fixed capital. This neocolonialism steadily widened the gap between the rich and poor capitalist countries and ploced new military and economic demands on the workers states. Thus, when the international recession and the Portuguese crisis created a new situation, the economic framework and political machinery existed for applying the new imperialist strategy, the major elements of which may be summarized as follows:
1. To lower the "color line" from the Zambezi to the Limpopo, that is, from Rhodesia to South Africa,
2. To protect the West's white bastion through a cordon sanitaire of "independent Bantustans, " Some of These Tie outside South Africa politically, others inside.
3. To consolidate the South African Common Market in Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Rhodesia (through attempting to install "majority rule" puppets who would guarantee the property of the white settlers), Angola and Mozambique (South African Interests in railroads, cheap labor to be exported to South African mines, the Cabora Bassa dam), and to some extent also in Nigeria and Ghana (banking, mining, and plantation interests). The potential labor reserve of this Common Market approaches 200 million, about half of all Africa.
4. To achieve this consolidation and expand it as one of the means by which to overcome the recession and problems of raw materials, through "coexistence." There was to be a veritable galaxy of black stars in the white Common Market.
5. To internationalize this process by gradually partitioning South Africa. All concentrations of wealth -the great cities, mines, finance centers, harbors, means of communication and transport, industry, the vast array of means of production and sources of raw materials - would remain firmly part of white South Africa. The supply of cheap labor, that is, the Africans, would continue to be treated as foreigners, but in a new sense: The Xhosa workers and peasants would have a Xhosa "homeland, " which would be recognized as their "nation"; the Zulus would have a Zululand, and so on. The aim is a "retribalization" of the tribal societies that had in fact been uprooted and overturned by Boer and British colonialism, an attempt to divide and rule
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SOUTH AFRICA HELL HELL RIKAN WITH NIT AFRIKAN A the "foreign immigrant" worker. "Africanists" and "traditionalists" would be employed at every level to further these ends "culturally. * The whites would remain absolutely dominant politically and economically. The approximately 2 million "colored" people and the 750, -000 Indians would be granted a special status based on the Coloured Affairs Department and Asion Affairs Department acting through "colored" and Asian Quislings functioning in the labor locations, schools, "bush colleges, "and churches. A subsidiary aspect of this process is the elimination of "petty apartheid" - the separate parks, beaches, waiting rooms in bus terminals, and so on. But "big apartheid" — the locations, barracks, labor reserves, wage differentials, disenfranchisement - would remain, not only in practice, but also in law, under the formula "equal but different. " These avenues of "new race relations" are already being explored by many liberal Boer and British circles, not to mention the EEC and the United States. The whites would continue to enjoy luxury and equality; locations, barracks, reserves, educational oppression, and deprivation of land would continue to be the lot of the blacks.
6. To further Bantustanize Namibia, granting it "indepandence" in the certain knowledge of West German collaboration, based on the racist German business colons established when Namibia was a German colony. (before the first world war).
7. To fortify the frontier: politically through the "independent" states and militarily through U.S. and EEC land and air forces basked up by NATO naval forces capable of penetrating these frontiers virtually at will, as was done in Angola in 1975-76.
8. To make no concessions to the non-collaborationist political movements in South Africa or to the demand for full democratic rights, including the full franchise, that is, the right not only to vote but also to be elected and to make the laws of the country on a non-racist basis. The foundation stone of the domestic aspect of this "détente" policy remains the British-drafted White Dominion Act of White Union, passed in 1910. 32
This Act, along with the economic, social, and cultural racism on which it is based, constitutes the white pole of "détente." The flag that now flies from this pole -the flag of black collaboration with white bosses — is intended to be invulnerable to the "winds of change." It will, however, be hauled down by the united weapon of non-collaboration of the non-European toiling masses in a social struggle that must inevitably result in a massive combination of Cuba and Vietnam. For in South Africa, unlike most of the rest of Africa, Imperialism cannot risk a solution that grants apparent racial equality but nonetheless maintains the white man as boss. South Africa combines the most explosive and concentrated contradictions of the entire Western system, and it is only the mighty and unbeaten proletariat, lacking in rights, landless, centered in the mines, and trained in the concentration camps, that will be able to achieve the complete abolition of racism, the agrarian revolution, full, non-racist democracy, and therefore the expropriation without compensation of white imperialistsettler capital and property in its entirety. Completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution The white socialists, trade unionists, and Stalinists who introduced or administered the industrial color bar always belitled the struggle for full democratic rights as a minor affair, not as important as socialism. Although they called for "socialism, " in 1922 they shot down AFrican miners and raised the slogan "For a white socialist South Africa. " They helped to break one non-European organization after another: the All-African Convention, which the Stalinists betrayed by becoming representatives in the all-white parliament, the trade unions, which they segregated on the basis of the Industrial Conciliation Act and the policy of "white labor"; the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, with more than 100,000 members during the 1920s, which was battered to death by the Liberal-Labour agents of the British Trade Union (Motherwell) Congress; the National Liberation League and the Non-European United Front, which the Stalinists sacrificed to Smut's second-worldwar effort in 1940. All these white "socialists" had one thing in common: They used socialism as the pretext by which to denigrate the struggle for democracy, thus protecting their own racist privileges. For genuine socialists, however, the struggle not to be treated like a pariah, to be a woman or man with dignity, and to build a non-racist society, was part of the stuff socialism is made of. It was part of the "happiness of each ... and the happiness of all" and not an abstraction fit only for Herrenvolk. "socialists" For whom the struggle of the slaves is not important. The white "socialists" in fact betrayed both the struggle for socialism and the struggle for democratic rights. Thus, the Communist party was created by anfi-African white British and emigré socialists. If maintained a color bar and its racial policy included the slogan "For a white socialist South Africa. " It supported racist indirect rule even before the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union