Class struggles in Africa

THE CLASS struggle in Africa is as much a part of the world class strut of the world capital- struggle as Africa is a Ist system.

Africa is not one whole, but is divided up into classes of workers and capitalists who are constantly at war with each other.

This class war means that, one way or the other, people all over the world 'take sides' over Africa. They are either on the side of the 99 per cent who toil for sub-wages or on the side of these who own and rule Africa for the sake of super-profits.

Britain is very deeply and very widely involved in the vast conflict between the super - exploited and their super-exploiters in Africa. Colour oppression in South Africa aims to place workers in a position where they cannot defend themselves against superexploitation. Above: All-white police deal brutally • with South African freedom-fighters. Arab Lebanese army. revolution and other Arab leaders to back down.

Despite its great show of support, including the presence of military advisors in Egypt, the Soviet bureaucracy, as part of its accommodation to imperialism, has been bringing pressure to bear on Nasser this column to follow this struggle in a topical way in the interest of a greater understanding and fuller participation of the British working class in the basic struggles in Many of the comments in the big daily papers about apartheid and other 'African' phenomena show, in many ways, the close connection between, for example, Britain and Africa.

Thus the famous hearttransplant man, Dr Barnard, of Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, twice criticised certain limited aspects of apartheid in early November.

And on November 9, speaking in New Lealand, the international dollar - millionaire golfer, Gary Player, winner of the British 'Open', called for the right of Papwa Sewgolum, the south African Indian' CLASS STRUGGLES THIS IS THE FIRST OF A WEEKLY COLUMN DEALING ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL SITUATION DEVELOPING player, to take part in South African golf "Opens'.

Following upon the exclusion of South Africa from the Olympics, as a result of the work of the anti-apartheid non-racial sports committee, anti-apartheid demonstrations have taken place right in England, at Twickenham, Leicester and Swansea, against the Springbok rugby tour of Britain.

On the other side, the British Rugby Union, backed by the police, keeps the apartheid tour going and the MCC invitation to the South African 'all-white' cricket team in 1970 still stands.

Even on the level of sport, it is clear that criticism does not stop the steam-roller of apartheid.

This is apart from the fact that the rugby boycott, for example, is impotent as long as there no subsequent boycott of the British unions and teams which play with the Springboks.

And this illustrates a more general truth: that the boycott of South Africa is as impotent as that of Southern Rhodesia, and is also what Lenin called a 'deception of the people', , as long as it is not, at the same time, a boycott or other form of struggle against Britain.

For one of the things that the daily news from Africa tells us is that without Britain South African apartheid could not last one night.

One of the most important questions for British labour is: where does the steam-roller of apartheid gets its apparently unstoppable momentum and its immense power from?

Does this weight and power come only from the economically weak 'Boers' (literally farmers, although in South Africa they do not farm, but live in the towns while the Africans work their farms)?

Does it come from the 'Afrikaners' led by the government of Vorster or the new 'opposition' Reconstructed Nationalist Party of Hertzog? Or have Britain, the United States and western Europe something to do with the colossus which crushes all life in South Africa?

For it was not a mere mining accident but a monstrous machine of superexploitation which crushed 60 Africans to death at one of the world's richest gold mines, at Buffelsfontein, near Klerksdorp, in the Transvaal, South Africa, on November 7.

For all this and much more is the consequence of the special way in which the African workers in South Africa are exploited by a system which is not only one of super-exploitation but also of super-oppression.

In South Africa, as in the rest of the continent, oppression and exploitation are as inseparable as emancipation and liberation.

imperialists who ruled over South Africa, like Cecil John Rhodes, in order to create a permanent force of docile, policed, defenceless, rightless, cheap labour.

This was not done out of any particular hate, but for the sake of the investments and profits of the big mining and other companies in South You would not know it, but if you happen to read the stocks and shares columns in the financial pages of the big papers of England, you are reading the balance sheets of apartheid.

For a very large number of companies quoted on the London Exchange are superexploiting African workers in South Africa (and Rhodesia and many parts of Africa) and the way they do it is by means of apartheid.

Most of these companies are British. And this alone makes apartheid of direct concern to the British economy and hence to everyone in Britain. Importance Much will have to be said about the importance of South Africa to the British economy and also to the Anglo-American - West European North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Much will have to be said about what the toilers of South Africa, and of Africa (of which South Africa is by far the most important part economically, and, ultimately, politically) are doing about their exploitation and oppression.

The 'outside world' hears only indirectly and incidentally, when a Dr Barnard or a Gary Player criticize, not the causes and reasons apartheid, but only its worst or most absurd consequences.