British Capital Has a Finger in the Apartheid Pie

Once more the frustration and anger of South Africa’s oppressed people have burst through The Durban riots were precipitated by police destruction of illicit beer stills.

The women in the urban locations brew beer to subsidize the men’s low wages. The demand is immense, for Africans are forbidden by law to purchase liquor except in the municipal beer-halls.

Liquor brewing and ‘shebeens’ (illegal pubs where alcohol is sold) are part of location life, and white police have been known to organize the ‘shebeen’ trade—the same police who afterwards conduct the brutal liquor raids.

Herd them into ghettos The other immediate factor in the Durban riots was the threat of slum clearance.

These clearances are not conducted for humanitarian reasons. Shanty-towns like Cato Manor—where there were fierce riots ten years ago—are mushroom growths, and it is the government’s segregation policy to herd the people into controlled tribal ghettos.

The moment when the removals are made is determined by the fact that the land has become valuable for industrial purposes, or that the shanty-town lies in the midst of a white residential area.

The people have therefore resisted these further attempts to regiment their lives, and have defended their right to live where they choose—even though this means living in tin shacks.

When the people of Sophiatown, in Johannesburg, resisted the removal scheme, the police and the army, with Sten guns and armoured cars, removed them by force.

The brutality of South Africa’s ruling class has its own momentum. But its roots lie in the necessity for systematic exploitation.

Supply of cheap labour Apartheid is a scheme to ensure the supply of cheap black labour, and to retard the political development of the non-white peoples.

When, as in Cato Manor ten years ago, the people turn not only against the whites but also against the Indians who live in the location as petty traders and landlords, this is the result of the government’s deliberate fostering of divisions among the oppressed peoples.

Government agents stoke up anti-Indian feeling, provoking the Africans into seeing the small shopkeeper—who lives by profits of halfpennies—as the big exploiter.

* * * IN spite of vast industrial growth, the South African economy is dominated by the mines and agriculture.

Farming is still largely unmechanized and methods are backward; this is both the cause and effect of cheap labour.

The owners admit that they overcome the problems of low grade ore and difficult access to the deposits in the mines by means of cheap labour.

Small wonder that last month Harry Oppenheimer, in his - chairman’s statement to the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa, expressed his confidence in the Union’s future and made an elaborate apologia for the ‘positive’ aspects of apartheid.

As early as 1894 Cecil John Rhodes proposed that the Africans be herded into reserves and compelled to pay taxes, thus forcing them out to work.

This is the basis of apartheid: about half of the 8,500,000 Africans are crowded on to the reserves, which today comprise only 12 per cent. of the Union’s total land surface.

Why the pass laws?

Here are the reservoirs of cheap labour. From here the _men go to work in the mines, or on the farms, for periods ‘ranging from six to eighteen months.

This is the migrant labour system which determines the condition of the majority of the Africans as ‘peasantworkers’, thus retarding the growth of a permanent urbanized working class.

Africans are naturally attracted by the relatively higher wages and less servile conditions in industry, and so a steady move towards the urban areas has asserted itself despite restrictions and control.

The pass laws are an attempt to redirect and regiment the . free movement of labour, and to force men to seek work in the sectors which suffer from labour shortages—i.e., the mines and the farms.

The South African mines are owned and controlied by the City of London. According to the supplement to the Quarterly Bulletin of Statistics on the results of the 1956 census,

THB NEWSLETTER published by the South African Reserve Bank:

‘The United Kingdom was the Union’s most important creditor, as appears from the total foreign liabilities of £865,600,000 towards that country . The mining industry was responsible for the largest share of foreign .

investment in the Union, viz., -£453,600,000.’

‘Top’ newspapers’ murmured revulsion The extent of British capital’s influence on the apartheid policies of South Africa is not specially stressed by the ‘top’ newspapers in Britain when they murmur their revulsion at what the South African government is doing.

It is easy for the liberal do-gooders to protest against a government 9.000 miles away. Apartheid is presented as a moral issue.

We have to understand the nature of capitalist exploitation in South Africa, and the stake which international finance capital, especially British capital, has in the oppression of the non-white peopies.

* * * To call on the British consumer to boycott South African products is not only impracticable but individualistic. It obscures the international character of the working class.

A call must be made to organized labour to show its solidarity with the African people. ee The refusal of dockers and transport workers to handle South African goods would strike a blow not only at the South African ruling class but also at British capitalism.

Internationalism begins at home. The British working class can most effectively help the African people in their struggle by fighting and weakening their ‘own’ ruling class.

Destruction of Labour movement The first practical step we should take is to demand, through local Labour Parties and trade union branches, that the National Council of Labour organize a central London protest demonstration.

British workers should be: made aware that apartheid is THE sanctions imposed by the printing workers on the News Chronicle last week recall the historic action taken by the machine-men of the Daily Mail in 1926, the ‘first shot’ in the General Strike.

The General Council of the Trades Union Congress had been empowered on Saturday, May 1, to call a general strike in support of the miners.

But on the evening of Sunday, May 2, they were still negotiating with the Cabinet, and had agreed to urge the miners to accept the possibility of a reduction in wages.

They had made it quite plain to the other side that they did not want to fight, and a section of the Tory leaders, headed by Churchill. were keen to force a show-down, being confident that they could beat such half-hearted opponents.

Late that night Baldwin, the prime minister, sent for the representatives of the General Council, told them that ‘gross interference with the freedom of the Press’ had taken place and demanded that they repudiate this.

Bewildered, they went into a huddle to confer; and when they came back later to tell Baldwin they would do what he asked, they found he had gone to bed.

They had to go ahead with the General Strike whether they wanted to or not. As we know, they headed it in order to behead it, with disastrous consequences for. the whole working class.

JUNE 27, -1959 the British fascists’ policy for Africa.

The division of Africa into black and white States means no more than the segregation policy of South Africa extended to the whole continent.

British fascists and those who finance them have a policy for Britain too.

Cheap and. controlled labour is the basis of a fascist economy. Cheap labour in Britain means the destruction of the Labour movement; controlled labour means a_ police State.