APARTHEID DEEPENS
STRUGGLE AGAINST According to official figures, 172 Africans were killed and 1,200 wounded by South African police in Soweto, Alexandra, and other racist cheap labor camps around Johannesburg and Pretoria between June 16 and 20. Unarmed, the Africans had risen up against the use of Afrikaans and Bantu and for the use of English as the language of instruction in the schools, against the Bantu Education Act, against the partition of South Africa into a "White South Africa" and a number of Bantu "homelands, " and against the final disenfranchisement of the non-Europeans — the loss of South African citizenship and nationality and the substitution of "homeland" tribal and "ethnic" "cifizenship." The implied essence of the uprising was the struggle for one undivided non-racial nation. The same basic issues remained central in the flare-ups that continued throughout South Africa during August, with more than 100 more Africans massacred, again according to official figures. There were mass boycotts of the location schools and many of them were burned down. The underlying motivation here was the demand to live in the cities themselves as full and equal citizens. Missionary churches were put to the torch around Johannesburg and later, in mid-August, near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape. The underlying motif was again the same: rejection of white Anglican, Catholic, and Liberal racist and imperialist paternalism, the centuriesold racial segregation of the European churches, and their systematic indoctrination and intellectual starvation of the oppressed people. In the Transkel, which is due to become "independent" on October 26, 1976, tens of thousands of students demonstrated against this "independence, " against "ethnic self-determination, " and for a single, common South African citizenship for all; 286 students were arrested. In the "Botswang homeland" the toilers burned down the Botswana "parliament, " built by Prime Minister Vorster and his tribal Quislings in Mafeking. The content of the nationwide struggles was the total rejection of rocial partition and the demand for absolute equality (which has nothing to do with the American rac ist-paternalist notion of "integration"); these were south africa by LANGA the underlying characteristics of the struggle of the workers and students. If was part of Vorster's strategy to arrest not only the non-collaborators, but also the collaborators. By August 24 the total number arrested since June 16 had risen to more than 2,000; the official death toll stood at 282, of whom only 3 were white, all of them policemen. The Bantu Affairs Department and the government, backed by the pro-British United party and the Liberal "opposition, " took a "hard-soft" line against the uprising. The "soft" side was to hold conferences with "leaders" in Soweto, to make certain property concessions to an aspiring ghetto trading and professional group, and to allow the Bantustan chiefs, Matanzima, Buthelezi, and others, to assemble at Jan Smuts airport on August 21 to denounce the repression of the anti-Bantustan struggle and apartheid. The "hard line" was clearly spelled out by Michael Botha, a government minister, on August 20: "The urban blacks were present in the white areas to sell their labor and for nothing else, " he said. "Those who accepted the citizenship of a tribal homeland would be more welcome in white areas than those who did not. But the struggle of the Africans was against both the "hard" and "soft" line of the racist "Boer" regime, British-created and backed by the EEC, NATO, and U.S. imperialism. Non-European unity Against the background of the attempted general strike by more than 250,000 workers near Johannesburg during the first and third weeks of August and of the anti-tribal struggles in the locations and "homelands" (cheap-labor rural reserves), the struggle spread to Cape Province. As a protest against the Bantuization of education and citizenship, it was taken up by layers of the so-called colored population (defined by the Population Registration Act as "neither white nor black"). The government failed to seal this section of the oppressed off from the African section. "Colored" students from the tribal "colored" "Bush college" at Belville near Cape Town marched in support of Soweto during the second week of August
SOUTH AFRICA and many were arrested. Further "colored"- African solidarity actions took place in the Western Cape on August 24, after thirty workers and students (official statistics again) were killed in an African location outside Cape Town. Information reaching this writer but not reported in the Western press indicates that in Worcester and other towns of the Western Cape "colored" students defied police patrols and guard dogs placed outside the mission and the state school gates. And at the giant "colored" location of Bontheuvel, Cape Town, police fired on a mass protest of 5, 000 "colored" workers and students, killing several. Bontheuvel was sealed off by police on August 26-27. These demonstrations were against the Coloured Affairs Department and colored tribalization as well as the Bantu Affairs Department and Bantu tribalization. Demonstrators declared: "We will never stand with the whites. We stand together with the Africans. " This, together with non-collaboration, is the heritage of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). The NEUM itself clearly has to be recreated by the new generation of non-collaborators along with those of the old generation who have not succumbed to abstention. Western press reports of anti-Indian riots in Soweto are false. According to information received by this writer, one such incident was due to mistaking an Indian for a white, and in others Indians actually assisted the Africans materially, and also politically in two areas, Unless the "black consciousness" agents of the government divert the struggle, the government will be unable to repeat the anti-Indian pogrom organized by the British in Durban in 1949. Adding fuel to the fire In an atmosphere of near panic - marked, among other ng, by a 20 percent slump on world stock markets
Tand ond Free State mining shares, which are held some 300 British, German, French, Italian, U.S., anation, laroli, and Australian companies, plus. Anglo-Boer associate companies - the government made a number of hasty "concessions." These included an offer to cancel Afrikaans as a compulsory language medium in the schools. The students and teachers replied with a demand for the withdrawal of police, the elimination of Bantu Affairs Department control, and the release of the arrested students and workers. The schools were boycotted and burned down in some cases. The Bantu education issue remained the central one, spreading to all major locations in all the main city areas of South Africa. The African National Council (ANC) and the Communist party, never accustomed to making Bantu education or the Bantustans a major political issue, were caught unawares. Winnie Mandela and others in Johannesburg suddenly found themselves being offered the governmentcontrolled television to broadcast the expected and required militant speeches in order to draw the struggle away from the major questions of Bantu education and "homelands" and onto the usual "militant" ANC stunts separating the "pass laws" from the central political issue. When this ruling class maneuver failed, Winnie Mandela and others were arrested. These arrests of members of the ANC and other groups, including SASO (South African Students Organization), were designed partly to terrorize the people and partly to hold up collaborationist, supposedly militant leaders before them, The same purpose was behind the arrest of the collaborationist Democratic party "opposition" to Matanzima in the Transkei "homeland, " for this partly made it possible for Matanzima, Vorster's Quisling, to use the Nunga (the fake "homeland parliament") to present himself as the loyal opposition. The latest concession of Vorster and his Minister of Justice Kruger was to offer "home ownership" rights to the handful of petty-bourgeois aspirants in Soweto, They would be allowed to own their own cages instead of renting them from the Bantu Affairs Department. This move was transparently designed to cut off a section of the location exploiters against the toiling masses, and it was foredoomed to failure, because it was precisely against the location system, as part of the "homelands" fraud, that the anti-Bantuization struggle in Soweto was being waged. For the same reason, Vorster's much-vaunted concession of August 8 - that the "residents" of Soweto and other locations would "run their own affairs" — was in fact not at all a concession but rather an intensification of the Bantu "self-determination, " "autonomy, and self-rule" policy of white domination. The regime's concessions merely added fuel to the fire. During the last week of August, however, the government, backed by heads of the Chambers of Mining, Commerce, and Industry, who began a witch-hut against strikers, was partly successful in using "Zulu" collaborators to induce re-tribalized "impis" (so-called war parties) to attack strikers and students. More than
thirty people were killed, some by police and some by thugs, while the police watched from their EEC-built armored cars. The strike itself was 90 percent successful in the big industrial areas of Langlaagte and Industria and was nearly 100 percent solid in the city department stores. Nevertheless, there was no strike in the big industrial firms and the mines, the hub of the whole South African economy, nor in the massive municipal services. The Namibia concession to Germany Parallel to his "hard-soft" reaction to Soweto, Vorster announced that Namibia would become "fully independent" on December 31, 1978; until then it would be ruled by an interim white-dominated government under an African "chief. * This was the first fruit of the VorsterSchmidt-Kissinger talks held in Germany last June, during which Schmidt, on behalf of German imperialism, demanded "independence" for Namibia, which would then become a neocolony in which the property of German former Nazis, who still control a large portion of the economy, would be guaranteed. The SWAPO and ANC, along with their white CP, Liberal, Anglican, and Catholic patrons, are steeped in a tradition of working within political apartheid. As late as 1922 the CP itself called for a "white socialist South Africa" during a strike by white miners against the African miners' being given the right to perform skilled labor. After its formation by white labor aristocrats and liberal Europeans, the CP ran apartheid unions and violated the non-European boycott of apartheid elections by putting up white Communists as "native representafives" under the Native Representation Act of 1936. During the first two years of the second world war the CP collaborated with the Nationalist Boer pro-Nazis, and later switched to support General Smuts and the British empire. None of these parties paid serious attention to the Bantu Education Act or the Bantustans - until now, when they are trying to cash in on the independent, self-organized struggles of the toilers. The toilers are struggling against Bantuization because they know that it is a major pillar of dispossession and disenfranchisement. The oppressed workers of South Africa want an end to this dispossession and disenfranchisement. They want to disposses their dispossessors, to own the whole of South Africa and to have full democratic rights for all on a non-racial (not multiracial, which is actually racist) basis. There is only one basis for self-determination in South Africa: the expropriation of the expropriators and the enfranchisement of the oppressed. This is one combined and inseparable demand. This inseparability is precisely the dilemma of the Herrenvolk imperialists, who know that they cannot separate the question of property from the question of the franchise, as they did in most of the rest of Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, etc.). The toilers of Soweto said clearly: We don't want Soweto. We don't want a Transkei Bantustan or its citizenship. We don't want to "run our own affairs" in Soweto or in any other of your labor camps. We don't want "separate development." We don't want "our own identity, " tribal or "national, " which is the identity of segregated, inferior cheap labor slaves. We don't want to separate or be separated. We don't want the partitioning of South Africa into a white part and a black part, which is to-
5
SOUTH AFRICA day's reality anyway. We reject the idea that the Xhosa or the Zulu or the Sotho or the Tswana are "nations. " We reject the idea that the Boers are a nation, or the English, or the Jews, or the whites as a whole. Although it was not expressed explicitly, the clear implied goal of the rebellion was this: The dismantling of the entire fabric and machinery of separation and the building of one undivided non-racial nation with full and equal rights for all and with the whole territory as the property of one and only one nation. This and only this is self-determination for the oppressed of South Africa. And this and only this is the implication of Soweto's rejection of Bantu education and Bantustan "independence." Any separate state for any group is a rocist fraud aimed at perpetuating the status quo of white supremacy. Soweto: a working-class struggle Soweto, Alexandra, and the other "townships" in which the June uprisings against Bantu education occurred are working-class labor-camp ghettos. Nearly half of the urban non-European working class (African, "colored," and Indian) live in these "townships." These locations, along with the compounds for mining and heavy industry (these are mainly bachelor concentration camps for cheap labor) lie along the famous Rand, a gold-bearing, uranium, coal and industrial-commercial belt some 100 kilometers long, with the city of Johannesburg as the buckle of the belt. Most of the means of production in this belt are owned by British imperialism, along with other EEC imperialist investors, as well as U.S., Canadian, Australian, and Israeli capital. In other words, it is a concentration of world capitalism. The African workers in this belt live in giant racial ghettos outside the cities of Johannesburg, Benonik, Germiston, etc., far from and excluded from the city streets, bars, cafes, parks, public buildings, cinemas, theaters, swimming pools, schools, universities, hospitals, and so on. They have no trade-union or political rights. They cannot own houses or flats or choose where to live. They do not even have the right to live permanently in the peri-urban locations, for their residence there is strictly limited on the basis of the old Britishimposed pass laws of the nineteenth century. The miners! Families live thousands of kilometers away, in the "Banfustans, " which are rural, cityless, industrially starved reserves of cheap labor. Likewise, the workers in heavy industry and transport are separated on a large scale from their families and live in labor compounds or barracks. This "de-urbanization" of the proletariat is a long-standing policy of the ruling class. It is coupled with the denial of land to would-be peasants. All this was created and is preserved mainly by British imperialism. The Boers are mainly the managers; the white workers are labor aristocrats and bureaucrats in a social alliance with the Boer, British, and European capitalists against the non-European working class, which alone produces surplus value in South Africa. Such is the basic social structure. This was the class line-up into which Soweto 6 fitted as a major part of the South African industrial working class (which is formally denied the right to do skilled labor and is paid at unskilled rates for the skilled labor it does perform in reality). The Soweto workers fighting apartheid form an integral and basic part of the international proletariat. The fact that history has not shaped this class in the classic mold, that it is not properly urban or industrial, is itself characteristic of the specific semicolonial nature of this proletariat. But a proletariat it is, and Soweto, like Sharpeville in 1960, is part of the long history of international labor in its struggle for emancipation from capital. 'Self-determination' and 'independence frauds The Vorster regime, in collaboration with EEC and American imperialism and with the full support of all white groups and "cultures" in South Africa (Afrikaons, English, Jewish, and German, mainly) is increasingly counterposing the slogan of "self-determination" to the demand for uncanditional, non-racial democracy and equality. In countries like South Africa, in which the whites live in an "imperialist country" and the non-whites in a semicolony (or colony, as Trotsky said in his 1935 letter to South Africa), the "national question" is different from what it was in Tsarist Russia, In Russia the Tsars had a policy of Russification, denying national rights to the Georgians, Uzbeks, Poles, Cossacks, etc., preventing the formation of national states within the empire, denying self-determination and secession. In South
Tollets White Tolets Below
Africa, on the other hand, imperialism, both Boer and British, has always tried to create separate tribal ministates, has encouraged tribal languages, sponsored "cultural identity," and marked out separate territories for white and "black" (the latter territories further divided among Africans, Indians, and "colored"). The African population was then additionally divided along artificially preserved and sometimes recreated tribal lines. The penultimate culmination of this was the policy of indirect rule; the ultimate form is "independent" Bantu states, with all Xhosas holding citizenship in Xhosaland, all Zulus in Zululand, and all non-Europeans losing South African citizenship. The whites, of course, would then be the sole citizens of the white Republic of South Africa. As against the Russification policy of the imperialist and racist Tsars, the oppressed peoples of Russia fought for and, after the Russian revolution, won national self-determination, autonomous republics with the right to secede, which right was in fact exercised in some cases. As against the racist self-determination policy of white imperialism in South Africa, however, the oppressed stand for unity and equality, which is opposed by the Western-backed racist regime of South Africa, The "self-determination" sponsored by the regime boils down only to this:
*Sixteen million Africans (or "Bantu") will have tribal homelands without cities, Industry, or wealth;
*The 2 million "colored" people, mainly in the Cape, and the 1 million Indians, mainly in Natal, will be placed in a similar situation. In fact, on August 9, after Soweto, Vorster appointed a new commission to advise his government on how to fit the latter two groups into his partition scheme. The previous commission had recommended that steps be taken toward political integration of them, but this was rejected by the government in 1976. The fact that sections of the "colored" oppressed risked their lives in demonstrations supporting the Soweto struggle during the first two weeks of August shows that any attempt by the regime to turn the "coloreds" into whites will not work, nor is it likely to be acceptable to either side. It would involve equalization of wages, which would ruin white-owned industry and farming in the Cape and Natal. It would also be the thin edge of the wedge of general political equality and social integration, the type of reform that would tend to escalate;
*The four and a half million whites will remain the sole citizens and owners of 90 percent of the land area of South Africa, holding all the cities, railways, harbors, airports, mines, farms, universities, hospitals, and natural resources. In fact, it is the whole of South Africa to which both the white oppressors and the black oppressed lay claim, and neither will or can accept a state or citizenship in less than this whole. In this context, any "self-determination" or "autonomy" For any particular ethnic group is entirely a white racist concept. This defines the national question in South Africa. The only possible solution is equal and full citizenship in a single non-racial state, as the Non-European Unity Movement has always said.
Running your own ghettos An integral part of the policy of Bantuization is local "self-rule" within each location and compound inside the separate white state of South Africa, the 90 percent of the territory left to the whites after partition. Inside Soweto, for example, which like most locations is already divided into artificial tribal units, there will be a new tribal form of the old Location Advisory Boards. The Xhosas in Soweto will "run their own affairs, " which mears the compulsory use of Xhosa as a medium in the schools in order to further the process of tribalization. The Zulus will have "their own councils, " with Zulu as the language medium, as well as Zulu-speaking schools, and so on. There may be an "inter-tribal" council for the whole location of one and a half million people. They will have "their own" tribal police to keep "order. " All this is not conjecture but the "solution" to the Soweto problem announced by Vorster, Batha, and Kruger on August 9. This offer of local self-rule for non-citizens lacking all rights, future immigrant workers holding citizenship in some remote Bantustan, was forcefully rejected by the people of Soweto and Alexandra immediately as Vorster made his announcement. The rejection took the form of burning government buildings, schools, and transport, and a largely successfül general strike, which lasted for three days. In Soweto alone, some 200,000 workers stayed off the job, These actions were not staged at the work places or in the cities, where the white regime is in complete control and the whites a majority, but in the ghettos themselves. The strikes clearly said: "We don't want Soweto, we want Johannesburg! We don't want locations and Bantustans, we want the whole of South Africa for everybody!" And it was this implied but deep-seated rejection of "self-determination" and instead the demand for full democratic rights which caused Vorster to say that his location Quislings were no longer "able or willing" to collaborate with him. The imperialist gold-mining and financial multinational corporations that really own South Africa are beset by the recession, which has affected South African gold shares and the price of gold itself (especially, paradoxically, during the upturn). A boycoft by labor in the imperialist countries of South African Imports and exports, especially gold, uranium, diamonds, oil, and arms, would deeply assist the South African proletariat in its struggle against racism and apartheid. The boycott is debased and made meaningless by the Communist party and ANC would-be collaborators and by the Wester liberals and World Council of Churches, whose constituents have heavy investments in South Africa. It can become a weapon of liberation only if it is based on the principle of non-collaboration with imperialism, that is, if it becomes an international working-class weapon. This requires patient explanation, industrial action, and a self-interested "sacrifice" of immediate and national interests to the long-term and internationalist ones of the world proletariat, of which the workers of Johannesburg, Soweto, Port Elizabeth, Cape Town, and the "homelands" are a basic and inseparable part. August 25, 1976
DBERIAL AVNISTA Al the moment when the mass movement is preparing for its final battle against the Francoist dictatorship, all the contradictions born of Spanish capitalist development are sharpening in an extraordinary manner. Spanish society has been transformed into a developed capitalist society. But this transformation has occurred within the framework of a bloody and repressive dictatorship. All the contradictions and corruption characteristic of imperialist decline are thus being doubly intensified within the Spanish state. The social composition of the country has changed substantially. Already the active population in the countryside represents no more than 25 percent of the total population. The greater part of the population is concentrated in the great industrial cities and the working class represents more than 70 percent of the total population. But this process of copitolist transformation has not been accompanied by substantial structural reforms, Spanish capitalism has relied on completely external factors for it "mirocle" of industrialization: the incomes of the workers forced to emigrate to other European countries, the income from tourism, foreign investment, etc. Today, when the crisis of international capitalism is being openly manifested, the structural weakness of Spanish capitalism is likewise becoming potent, along with its lack of competitive strength compared with Europe, its inability to grant significant improvements to the mass movement in the country, and so on. For years the maintenance of the dictatorship as a specific form of bourgeois rule enabled the ruling class to extract superprofits through the superexploitation of the workers and to prevent the organization of the mass movement. But throughout the fifteen years of struggles since the general strike of the Asturian miners in 1962, the mass movement has been imposing its positions, has increased its organization, drawn in all the oppressed sectors behind its mobilizations, and has now signed the death warrant of the Francoist dictatorship. 8