From the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard
South Africa is the fourth most populous country in Africa, after Nigeria. Egypt and Ethiopia, but it is by far the richest in terms of wealth produced and capital accumulated. Although representing only four per cent of the land area of the African continent and only seven per cent of its population, it has been estimated that South Africa has 30 per cent of its income, 43 per cent of its mining production, 87 per cent of coal production, 75 per cent of steel production, 57 per cent of electricity production, 56 per cent of rail traffic, and 50 per cent of its motor vehicles and telephones. South Africa, then, is by far the most developed capitalist country in Africa. Its economy is based on the export of minerals (gold, platinum, chromium, diamonds) whose earnings have permitted the development of sizeable manufacturing and service sectors.
The special feature about South Africa is of course what for want of a better term will have to be referred to as the "radar break down of its population. Of its 26 million people, some 18 million (70 per cent) are of African origin, a little under five million (18-19 per cent) of European descent, the remaining three million or so being made up of about three-quarters of a million Indians and of people of mixed European. Asian and African descent.
Everyone in South Africa is by law classified into one of four “groups": European. Bantu. Coloured and Asian. The first group is also officially described as "Whites" and the others (as on park benches) as "Non-Whites". These, it must be emphasised, are the official legal classifications. They are not biologically-defined, but politically-defined groups, even though an individual s biological features and ancestry are used in this political definition. These classifications are absurd even on their own terms. For instance, some "Non-Whites" are whiter than some "Whites", while some "Europeans" are just as much of mixed origin as are those classified as "Coloureds": however their ancestors were able to pass as Whites sufficiently long ago to escape the race classifiers’ investigations. Further. Bantu (like Aryan) is a linguistic not a biological classification and. besides, is completely rejected as contemptuous by those so classified
Needless to say, "Non-White" too is also rejected as being the equivalent of "non-existent". Some political activists and groups in South Africa use the term "Black" as a substitute for — indeed as a reply to — "Non-White", thus including the Africans, the Coloureds and the Indians in a single group facing the Whites. Others, however, use "Black" to mean just the Africans. This can obviously lead to confusion, especially as in British usage the terms "Coloured" and "Black” are synonyms.
This whole discussion of so-called racial classifications shows that, in the end. no term is completely neutral, all are more or less political as the term used indicates the group or groups of human beings that the user thinks should unite (or be separated). In this game. then, the only terms that are acceptable to socialists are such terms as human race, citizens of the world, world working class and workers of the world.
Your racial classification in South Africa is important as it determines where you can live (and where you can’t) and. until very recently, who you could marry and who you could have sexual relations with (and with whom you couldn't). It also determines whether you are a first, a second or a third class citizen. For in South Africa there are. legally and not just factually, three classes of citizenship.
The first class is composed of those who have full political rights, the same for instance as those nearly everybody has in Britain and in particular the right to elect the members of the national law-making body. Such full political rights are enjoyed only by the Whites — by only one in six — less than 20 per cent — of the population.
The second class, constituted as recently as 1984, is made up of the Coloureds and the Indians who were allowed that year to elect their own members of the national parliament who have a limited (very limited in fact) role in the law-making process. This limited role was recognised by the overwhelming majority of Coloureds and Indians who boycotted the elections — there was a turnout of only about 20 per cent — seeing participation as an acceptance of their second-class status.
The third class is composed of the African majority — representing 70 per cent of the population — who are without any political rights whatsoever at national level. Some do have a vote at local level, while others (some four million) can, on paper, vote for the parliaments of the so-called Bantustans like the Transkei. In fact these latter are not regarded as being South African citizens at all. let alone third-class ones.
Apartheid — which is merely the Africaans for segregation — originally had a much more ambitious project than maintaining White political supremacy by denying the other groups full citizenship rights. As laid down by the National Party which has held power in South Africa without interruption since 1948, it wanted to prevent the Africans from becoming permanently established in the "White" towns and to allow them to be there only temporarily as migrant labourers (and. of course, domestic servants). But what apartheid, as embodied in rigid laws which the National Party government enacted after coming to power in 1948 sought to keep apart, the development of capitalism brought together. Over the years a permanent African urban working class, employed at all levels in manufacturing and service industries and not just in mining, has come into being. In fact since 1975 the majority of urban dwellers have been Africans.
The National Party governments have had to recognise this and to make concession after concession to the economic facts: Africans have been permitted to form trade unions and have taken strike action, the notorious pass laws are soon to be abolished, while other reforms have granted urban Africans property and even municipal voting rights in the towns. Only two of the original pillars of apartheid now remain — the Group Areas Acts laying down residential segregation (and reserving 85 per cent of the land area for the Whites) and the discriminatory political structure — but this latter too is now beginning to totter.
South Africa's present political structure where your say in the political decision-making process depends on your racial classification and which completely excludes 70 per cent of the population is so anachronistic that it is universally — and rightly — condemned, especially since political power is now being brutally used to impose the government’s authority on the unwilling majority. Even the capitalists and Thatcher condemn it. There is no reason to challenge their sincerity here since the South African system is anachronistic even from a capitalist point of view. Historically capitalism has sought to reduce all relations and differences between people to one: economic, to whether you are rich or poor, employer or employee, capitalist or worker. It didn't demolish feudal relations based on birth and legally-defined estates to see such distinctions re-introduced as racially-based citizenship classes.
Basically, capitalism wants a political structure which protects and enforces the property rights of the owning class and which ensures political stability within which the extraction of surplus value from the working class can proceed undisturbed by extraneous. non-economic considerations. Although both theory and practice have shown that political democracy is the ideal capitalist political form, this is not something that the ruling class anywhere has ever spontaneously applied nor. when faced with the choice between political stability and political democracy, will a capitalist class automatically prefer the latter. Historical experience (Nazi Germany. Fascist Italy, Franco Spain. Greece under the Colonels for example) shows that they will sacrifice political democracy and embrace dictatorship, at least for a temporary period, if this is the price of securing a stable political regime.
So political democracy has generally had to be forced on capitalism by popular pressure, in particular from the working class. Workers were right to press for political democracy since this provides the best framework both for the propagation and spread of socialist ideas and for the peaceful establishment of socialism. Since political democracy does not exist in South Africa, workers, besides becoming socialists, need to struggle for its establishment there too.
Over 50 per cent of the population of South Africa now live in the towns and, as indicated, since 1975 over 50 per cent of this urban population — which is overwhelmingly working class — wage and salary earners — has been African, a percentage which is growing all the time. This African and Coloured urban wage and salary working class majority, representing an even greater percentage of factory workers, could bring enormous political pressure to bear on the government to move towards granting them the same political rights now enjoyed exclusively by White workers. In fact the South African capitalist class has already got the message and has also been putting pressure on the Botha government to move in this direction.
Of course it is not going to be easy. People are going to be thrown into jail. People are going to be beaten up. And people are going to be killed by the "security" forces. Indeed, all these things are happening at this very moment. Sooner or later, however, the South African government is going to have to retreat as it did over economic apartheid and to move more and more towards political democracy. But the struggle should not stop there. Political democracy is not an end in itself — it leaves working class exploitation intact and working class problems unresolved — but merely as a means to the end of socialism. This more important struggle will still need to go on.
Adam Buick
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