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From Notes of the Month, International Socialism, No.57, April 1973, pp.3-4.
Transcribed & marked up by by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Basker Vashee writes: The ‘rising tide of black rage’ exploded in South Africa, in clear defiance of the law, when 200,000 workers downed tools in Natal during the past five weeks. The strikes, largely spontaneous and lasting between three hours and three days, hit all major manufacturing industries, the docks and municipal services in Durban. The bitterness of black workers, expressed in militant demonstrations, was not surprising in view of the dismal average wage of £4 per week for men and £2 for women, on top of a hefty increase in the black cost of living index of 11.4 per cent in the past year. Most workers experienced a slight drop in real wages in the so-called ‘growth’ industries in manufacturing in the past four years. To add insult to injury, manufacturing profits rose by 15-20 per cent per annum in the same period. The response of the employers was to grant panic increases of between 50 pence and one pound per week, which may restore the purchasing power the workers possessed a year ago.
The clamour for black unions from some sections of the employers and the white Progressive Party, betrays a growing contradiction in the economy. The traditional peasant economy that used to supplement the income of urban workers in periods of unemployment and sickness can no longer perform this function. In the mid-50s per capita income in the Reserves was a miserable £25 per annum and since then, with rising prices the real incomes have considerably fallen. The African and his family in the city therefore depend totally on wages to subsist. Growing militancy on his part would leave white employers with the alternatives of accepting a drop in the rate of profit or cutting into the inflated wages of white workers. Strong white trade unions and the implied threat to apartheid precludes the latter possibility. The third possibility is to increase the productivity of the African labour force, which now constitutes 80 per cent of the industrial working class. For productivity deals the employers need black unions. In this situation the danger of company unions is obvious. For instance, what annoyed the employers during the strike was the fact that the workers refused to nominate leaders, for fear of exposing them to the police.
The political implications of the strikes are more important. The conservative leader of British capital, Sir De Villiers Graaf, called them ‘the greatest threat to white South Africa’. The argument that British capital or ‘English-speaking capital’ could play a gradual and progressive role in South Africa by alleviating the more barbaric forms of exploitation, received a justified hammering. The strike revealed that the manufacturing sector, which is dominated by British capital is no different in its callous use of slave labour, than the more traditional slave camps in the mines and the farms. The fact was reinforced by the Guardian ‘revelations’.
More importantly, the tremendous solidarity and militancy demonstrated by the workers, once again ridicules the Communist Party (CP) perspective of a ‘progressive, democratic revolution’ in South Africa. The fundamental premise of the CP position is the separation of racial domination in the form of apartheid from the system of capitalism. This leads to the idea that the fight against racialism in South Africa can be separated from the fight for socialism. This is the reason for the CP call to ‘unite all sections and classes’ to fight white domination. Once the ‘popular front’ removes apartheid, socialism then can be on the agenda. This two stage theory ignores the very obvious historical process where the intensification of apartheid at every stage was primarily associated with a stage in the development of capitalism. Thus the growth of the manufacturing sector in the South African economy needed a more resolute control of labour and this in turn lead to influx control to ensure labour supplies where they are most needed.
Working class militancy threatens the very basis of apartheid by challenging white power where it really matters, at the point of production. The estimated two million non-white workers of South Africa can be the basis of a revolutionary party, without deviating into a ‘popular front’ or peasant guerrilla wars.
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