The history of the 'Communist' Party of South Africa

A REVIEW OF 'CLASS AND The history of the COLOUR IN SOUTH AFRICA' PAGE THE AUTHORS of 'Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950' were both leading members of the Communist Party of South Africa before it was banned by the Simons were ou this elementary step irward in the rewritil South African history• December 1969 League (ISL), a forerunner of the CPSA.

1950 Suppression of Communism Act.

sity up to 1964 when he was expelled by the government from the University.

Mrs R. E. Simons (Ray Alexander) was a leading trade unionist until banned in 1953 and was 'elected' , as a European, to be a 'Native Representative' in 1954, on the basis of the anti-African Native Representation Act A law of parliament stopped her from taking her seat in the all-white parliament.

They have written a book of 700 pages filled with much useful, interesting and important material.

It is the most comprehensive account to date of the history of the South African Communist Party, for this, essentially, is what the book is mainly about.

Despite the views and, possibly, the intent, of the writers, this book is the most revealing self-indictment to date of the so-called Communist Party of South Africa, a Party which, for a long time has had, and at the moment has particularly close ties with the Communist Party of Great Britain.

The British liberal theory THE opening page begins with a typical idea, long fostered by the liberal apologists of British imperialism, namely that apartheid and all its evils are a recent creation of the Boers and not, therefore, as it was, the creation, mainly, of British imperialism, whom the Boers act merely as exposed agents, hiding the role of their real masters.

The authors say '20 years of of unbroken rule by Afrikaner nationalism have all but destroyed the hope of a peaceful revolution' (p. 7) as if this was ever a possibility in a fascist 'slave colony' like South Africa.

They say that South Africa 'has been turned into a police state under the control of a white oligarchy which uses fascist techniques' (p. 8) as if The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) covered up for British i mperialism when it claimed 'apartheid' was the recent creation of the Boers, while, in reality, the Boers were merely acting as servants to British imperialism. Above: General Smuts (centre) surrounded by Boer commandos in 1902.

The authors choose not even to mention it, presumably because it came from the NonEuropean Unity Movement which opposed the segregationist policy of the CPSA (Communist Party of South Africa) with respect to 'native representation', , Popular Fronts with the anti-Boer Liberals and in working the Industrial Conciliation Act in the unions which. the CPSA thereby helped to divide along racial lines.

Unlike certain other CPSA writers, however, the Simons did not plagiarize from '300 Years', which has been used, among others, by the Africa Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR as a source-book.

Nevertheless, this 'oversight' it is not in keeping with the objectivity in many parts of 'Class and Colour' The influence of British liberal historians appears in the first section of the book dealing with the 19th century.

It repeats the liberal theory that the 1836 Boer Trek was caused mainly by the British 'abolition' of slavery in 1834 (p. 17), whereas '300 Years' and another Unity Movement history, 'The Role of the Missionaries' (Cape Town, 1953) showed clearly that the Boers trekked because they failed on their own to conquer and dispossess the Xhosa in the Eastern Cape, a task that was later, as the authors themselves show, albeit very inadequately, undertaken and completely- not by the Boers, but by the British.

Dealing with the conquest of the Zulu of Natal, the authors refer to this as a struggle 'between Afrikaners and Zulu' (p. 18), whereas the British had already entered the Natal L.C.. DEAL: GRIM REALITY lished as a series of glossy pamphlets by the company, he agreement spells out the massive concessions made by the union leaders in return for ... a 6.8 per cent wage raise.

They also say that the Boers trekked from Natal because Napier, the British Governor at the Cape, 'decreed strict equality before the law of all persons in Natal' (p. 18) when proclaiming Natal a British colony.

This is false-the Napier proclamation gave the Africans (Zulu) no rights at all and led to the strictest land and franchise laws, so strict that no African had the vote, let alone the right to stand for 'parliament', in Natal.

This theory gives the impression that the trek was due to the Boers' hatred of British liberalism, whereas the 19th century British conquest and occupation of the Cape and Natal is one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of British colonial expansion.

The Simons say 'Cape liberalism stood for racial tolerance' (p. 20).

They speak of the British immigrants as merely asborbing 'the racial prejudices of the older white inhabitants' (p. 20), whereas the British immigrants were one of the main sources of racial prejudice and discrimination.

Again, this implicitly proBritish and ostensibly antiBoer theory is an old one in the British liberal histories of South Africa.

Its absorption by the Simons is one of the intellectual by-products of the Popular Frontist collaboration of the CPSA itself with the liberals spawned by British imperialism.

The section on 19th century liberalism is, not accidentally, one of the weakest in the book.

At the same time, it fails almost totally to deal with the large-scale wars of dispossession and the epic resistance of the Africans who were dispossessed in a series of wars paralleled only by the conquest of India by Britain.

Earlier histories like "300 Years' thoroughly exploded the liberal-created myth of 'Cape liberalism' and it is a pity, to say the least, that the eliminating unnecessary and wasteful practices'.

Mr H. J. Simons lectured in African law and government at Cape Town UniverEVEN Cecil Rhodes, a major architect of modern apartheid, comes off rather lightly, for the authors blame the Afrikaner Bond of 1879 for increased racial practices rather than treating them as part of the Rhodes-spun British web of laws and practices from the time of the Kimberley diamond mines and, later, the Rand gold mines.

Both of these were opened up by British capital which, together with labour aristocrats mainly from Britain, created most of the network of labour concentration camps known as compounds, the industrial colour bar and the 'Bantustan'-type reserves (rural reservoirs of cheap labour).

It was in this period of the mining revolution that the basic colour-bar structure of South Africa was elaborated, economically and politically.

Yet the authors pay little or no attention at all to the work of Rhodes in his 1894 Glen Grey Act, which created what the Boers now call the 'Bantustans', , nor to the equally important pioneering segregatory work of Theophilis Shepstone in setting up the first significant reserves (in Natal) and in using the conquered chiefs as media of 'indirect rule' Would it be unfair to attribute this omission to hindsight, since the CPSA was later to work much of the political machinery set up by Rhodes and Shepstone?

In the sections on the diamond and gold mines, the Simons make a study of the British workers who came to South Africa in the final quarter of the 19th century.

'Some were staunch trade unionists • and ardent socialists, they write. 'White working men, set in authority over African peasants, despised them and also feared them as potential competitors' (p. 32).

Later, they often use the term 'socialist' and also 'classconscious' (p. 56) for antiAfrican, racialist workers, as though a socialist could be a racialist or a racialist a socialist.

Although they argue against their own terminology, it remains strange (yet perhaps not so strange) for Jack Simons, anyway, for he may remember a leading member of the CPSA saying in the Cape Town Railway Institute in 1940, when the CPSA was 'anti-war' and flirting with the Nationalist Party, that 'if you scratch under the skin of an Afrikaner BEHIND FINE now falls entirely on the local union officials and shop stewards.

Or has he forgotten?

The authors' treatment of the role of the missionaries, who have long been understood in the liberatory movement to have been prime agents in the conquest, dispossession and subsequent subjugation of the Africans, and prıme movers of educational segregation, is pathetic, to say the least.

But then the real analysis of the missionaries has come from those who stood for noncollaboration and not from those who repeatedly collaborated politically with them.

They still collaborate, in the Anti-Apartheid Committee in London, with the Anglican Church, one of the main and one of the oldest institutions of racial discrimination, both in church and school, in South It is thus perhaps not surprising that the Simons were unable to reveal missionaries like John Philip as pioneers of segregation, rather than 'a bearer of British culture as well as a teacher of the gospel' (p. 47).

12-4 up of the chapters dealing with 'White Labour' The Simons do not hide the role of founder-members of the CPSA who were also, at various times, leaders of the white workers.

Among these was W. ('Bill'). Andrews-leader, fore the first war, of the gineers' union.

Giving evidence the Mining Commission in 1908, Andrews declared that 'the coloured races, if unchecked, would rise to the top and endanger the state itself' (p. 88).

He came out strongly for an industrial colour bar against non-white workers.

Andrews and other 'socialists' 'certainly excluded the African from their vision of the ideal commonwealth' (p. 59).

Andrews and some of those who thought like him became founder members of the CPSA soon after the Russian RevoluEven in the time of Lenin and Trotsky and long before the Stalin regime the CPSA was born with the birthmark of racialism. all-white Transvaal Provinc Council and in 1914 he defe ded the 'white Labour poli against the African workers.

And this came, at the time, from the racialists emanating from social democracy, in particular from the British Labour The South African CP owed its first congenital defect to the British Labour Party and the chauvinists in the British trade union movement of the time.

At the same time, the South African Labour Party, an offshoot of the British Labour Party, took a leading role in the all-white parliament in introducing colour-bar laws for factories and mines.

The 1910 Act of Union, the basic constitution of apartheid to this day, was passed in the British Houses of Parliament without dissent.

The fundamental colour bar of South Africa was created by the British parliament, with the support of the Labour Andrews and other Labour Party leaders in South Africa wanted the Act amended, with 'separate "Native and Coloured Assembly" having only advisory power, to block the extension of the Cape's "coloured franchise" , and confine the vote to adult whites, subject to retention of their rights by existing coloured voters in the Cape' (p. 109).

No non-European was ever to be allowed to sit in parliaThis was the stand of the South African Labour Party, and, in principle and in their voting, of the British Labour And it was the stand, too, of founder members of the CPSA.

Another founder member of the CPSA, S. P. Bunting, was a Labour Party member of the the war' (p. 183).

Pro-Afrikaner 'anti-war' ANDREWS, Bunting and other founders of the CP became 'anti-war' , but not from the viewpoint of the non-white oppressed who 'enjoyed' the opposite of the democracy which Smuts and Britain were fighting for.

Rather did the 'left-wing' of the Labour Party incline to the 'anti-war' pressures of the proGerman Afrikaner Nationalists, with whom they had long collaborated in the provincial councils and parliament, and in Not that Andrews and company were pro-German.

They simply opposed the war in the interests of the Afrikaner worker, and Bunting on August 5, 1915, said they had to choose between the Afrikaner vote and support of clusion.

They produced a weekly, 'International' • and formed first the International League of the Labour Party and then the International Socialist Major So as not to antagonize the white workers, ISL statements 'condemned the use of violence and even strikes as instruments of social change' (p.211).

Their anti-war stand had nothing in common with the internationalism of Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Lenin, Trotsky and others who fought the war as an imperialist one, but the Simons fail to draw this conLEFT MPs

During the war Bunting considered the white workers more objectively and decided that they 'had been corrupted by racialism. "Slaves to a higher oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves in turn batten on a lower slave class"' (p.189), he wrote in 1916 in 'International' His views were not shared by Andrews and many others who, with him, set up the CPSA after the October Revolution.

Nor did he hold to his clear formulation of 1916 consistently.

Nor did International' which, in March 1916 'blamed capitalism for breaking down the "ethnological tendency" to a "natural social apartness of white and black"' (p.193).

The idea was that after a 'revolution' there would be 'apartness'. This is, literally, "apartheid', the official creed of the government of today in South Africa.

The 'anti-war' International' opposed mixed marriages editorially (p.194).

When it opposed the African Peoples' Organization and the African National Congress as 'petty-bourgeois' and 'nationalist', it did so not from the point of view of anti-imperialist internationalism, but from the viewpoint of the corrupted white Labour aristocracy, the social basis of social democracy.

The Russian Revolution IN 1917 Andrews came out for separate "parallel' unions for coloured and African And even in the midst of the Russian Revolution, which Andrews, Bunting, Jones and other ISL leaders hailed, ISL candidates were standing for all-white elections on the basis of the disfranchisement Act of Union of 1910.

At the same times they engaged in 'parallel' activity among coloured, Indian and African urban workers.

And 'Andrews continued to be a source of strength among white workers' (p.210).

For some time after its support of the Russian Revolution the ISL 'had no coloured or African members' (p.210), and the ISL continued to reject the struggle against colour discrimination as the central transitional struggle in South They used the question of the 'class struggle' to avoid and evade the national-liberatory struggle, like certain early white 'socialists' in America during the anti-slavery struggle, which Marx wholeheartedly supported.

In practice their 'socialism' remained racialism, its opposite.

The ISL continued to regard the white workers as 'advanced' and as the 'vanguard of revolution' (p.211).