Exploitation in South Africa (1976)

From the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to The Star (Johannesburg) of 28th April 1976, the recent increase of 18 per cent, in the price of “mealies” (maize cobs) will help erode “the small reservoir of goodwill that remains among more than 20m. Black and Brown South Africans”. Mealie is basic to the cost of living of something like three-quarters of South Africa’s population and “few products of inflation can weigh as heavily on the Black community as an increased mealie price”. This will lead to a worsening in race relations because many blacks cannot afford the increase. The article says that whilst an increase was “inevitable” it should be remembered that “vast numbers of our mealie farmers are relatively unproductive and inefficient”.

The Star says the solution must be two-fold. First, encourage the efficient farmers and discourage the inefficient ones. This presumably means to encourage the use of labour-saving machinery so that eventually, through competition, the “unproductive” farmers will be forced out of business. The second part of the “solution” is to pay the blacks more so that they can “afford to absorb knocks like the increased mealie price”. To make this practicable they must be “better trained and utilised” (our emphasis). Also they must be allowed to form “more effective industrial bargaining machinery” (i.e. Unions).

Black trade unions have no recognition in South Africa but it seems that the South African capitalist class and their agents, through their media like The Star, are beginning to recognize that they have a vast potential industrial proletariat which if it could be put to use profitably could bring them untold surplus-value in the future. The problem is that they need training, and that costs money and takes time. For the capitalists it is better to “adopt” the embryonic unions and have them under their wings than to allow them to develop in direct antagonism to the employers. The benevolence of the South African capitalists is staggering: once they have a black working class which is industrialized, working for a few pennies more, then they can carry on eating mealie and be grateful for it.

Our advice to workers must always be that, necessary as it obviously is for them to struggle against pressure to reduce the little they have, they should be seeking to understand why it is that one class can sell the goods which the workers produce alone and yet which do not belong to them unless they can buy them back. Once they understand this they will know that the time is long overdue for the change to Socialism.

T.K.

We are indebted to a correspondent in Johannesburg for supplying the material used above.