Class and colour in South Africa (1955)

From the May 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class struggle

The class struggle in a fully-developed capitalist society is a struggle between the ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which operates the means of production and is exploited by the ruling class. Such a struggle can be observed in full swing in countries like Britain and America. But in societies which are slightly less fully developed, the capitalist class has to fight not only against the working class, but against the previous ruling class—that is the class which derived its power from the ownership of land, and which formed the master class before the progress of large-scale industry threw up another class to challenge it. Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the strife between the old landed upper class and the rising industrial upper class, culminating in the victory of the latter in the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws 14 years later.

The situation in South Africa at the present time is in some ways not dissimilar to the situation in this country 130 years ago. There is a class which draws its wealth from the ownership of land; and there is a class which draws its wealth from the ownership of industry. There are, in fact, two kinds of society in South Africa: the old agricultural society, and the new industrial society. South African politics reflect the economic and social struggle between the old form of society and the new.

Dutch South Africa

The farming community of South Africa is very largely composed of Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch, Flemish. German Protestant and French Huguenot immigrants. These Afrikaner farmers own the land and employ Negro labourers. The landowners are and always have been determined that the Bantu shall form merely a floating population, with no stake in the land. The Bantu farm-workers have very little money; the white farmer pays the greater part of his labourers’ meagre wages in kind, in the form of huts to sleep and eat in, rough grazing for their few head of cattle, and seed for their garden plots. This form of society has existed, and from the point of view of the ruling and owning class has prospered, almost since the first settlers were put ashore, by the Dutch in the 17th century, to hold the Cape as a valuable halfway house for the ships trading to the East.

British South Africa

The Dutch took possession of the Cape as a landfall on the way to India; and the British stole (or, to use a more polite word, captured) it from them in 1806 for the same reason. As the century wore on, and the Dutch quarrelled with their new masters, the more independent spirits among the settlers trekked north, to Natal, then across the Orange River, and finally across the Vaal River. But British settlers followed them, attracted by the lure of diamonds and of gold. The apostle of this industrial expansion was Cecil Rhodes, at once Prime Minister of the Cape and Managing Director of the British South Africa Company; its centres of operation were Kimberley and the Witwatersrand, and its outlets Cape Town and the ports of Natal. A number of armed clashes between the British and the Boers culminated at the turn of the century in the Boer War, which, at length, the British won, by means of destroying the farmsteads of their enemies and transporting their families into concentration camps, where many of the Boer children died. It may be doubted whether at that time the strength of the new capitalist class was sufficient by itself to overcome the class which drew its strength from the land; but the ultimate issue was put beyond dispute by outside intervention. The farming-landowning class had been cut off from its former fatherlands in Europe; while the Capitalist class could count on the help of imperialist Britain, then the greatest industrial power in the world

This is the background of the South African scene. But the Boer War did not settle the matter. There was, and still is, much vitality left in the Afrikaner farming class. It still carries on its resistance to the industrial capitalist class; but in the long run one of them must go down before the other.

Black South Africa

The hostility between these two classes can be seen clearly in their respective attitudes to that majority of the South African population—the Negroes—who form the bulk of the working-class, alike on the farm owned by the Afrikaner and in the mine or factory owned by the Britisher. Each of them regards this class as subordinate. But while the Afrikaner’s self-interest drives him to adopt a harsh and oppressive policy, the Britisher, also motivated by self-interest, tends ip take a more “liberal” point of view.

To the Afrikaner the Negro has two possible capacities. He is, first and foremost, a rival for the ownership of the land. There were in 1946 over 8,000,000 Negroes in the Union, against 2,300,000 whites, nearly 1,000,000 Cape Coloured (of mixed white and black ancestry) and 200,000 Asiatics (nearly all of them Indians). Most of the Negroes are the descendants of the Zulu-Xhosa peoples, who came into the country from the North while the whites came in from overseas—the whites having exterminated or driven out the original black inhabitants of the area. These white and black invaders naturally found themselves in competition for the possession of the land. It has always been the policy of the Afrikaner landed interest to confine Negro ownership of land to certain fixed “Native” reserves: the Bantu can emerge from these reserves only as landless labourers on the white-owned farms, and must never be allowed to take root in the great areas of South Africa which are kept exclusively for white ownership. This restriction of Negro ownership always applied in the Afrikaner territories of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; and the granting of Dominion status to South Africa in 1909 by Asquith’s Liberal Government' enabled the Afrikaners (who were the numerical majority of the white population) to impose the same rule throughout South Africa. Since 1913, Negroes have been able to own land only in certain carefully limited areas of the Union. At the present time, more than three-quarters of the total population of South Africa can own land in only one-tenth of its territory. This fragment of South Africa set aside for Negro ownership consists largely of less favoured land in remote districts, such as the Transkei Reserve in eastern Cape Province. At the beginning of this year there was only one important urban area throughout South Africa where Negroes could own land : and that was in a suburb of Johannesburg called Sophiatown.

Anomaly

The Nationalist Government has now put a stop to this anomalous situation. It has built a new settlement of corrugated-iron-roofed one-storey-huts at Meadowlands, eleven miles outside Johannesburg, and has forcibly begun to evict the Africans of Sophiatown from their freeholds and to carry them and their goods to Meadowlands. There the Negroes will be allowed to become tenants of the land; but they will not be allowed to to own it. The Africans have no say in the matter. The Government says they must go, fixes the exact days, and provides transport and police. This operation is being carried out under the Native Resettlement Act, passed by a Parliament elected almost exclusively by the whites. The Nationalists claim that the removal to Meadowlands is aimed solely at improving Native housing; but there are other African locations around Johannesburg where the housing conditions are worse than at Sophiatown; and, what is more, the shacks of Sophiatown are being destroyed and the area reserved for white occupation— this in a city which is short of 50,000 houses for its black population (Daily Telegraph, 10/2/55). The real aim is clearly to destroy the African’s ability to own land in one of the few urban areas where he still had that right.

Apartheid

The Afrikaner, then, sees the Negro as a competitor for the ownership of the land; and is led thereby to support apartheid, the policy of confining each of the ethnic groups in South Africa to its own areas—with the unspoken corollary that the areas reserved for the white minority shall be much larger than the areas reserved for the coloured majority. But to the Afrikaner the Bantu is not only a competitor for the land: he is also a farm-labourer. If apartheid were carried out in full, as is advocated by the extreme wing of the Nationalists, who would do the work? The extremists, those who embrace apartheid in all its pristine purity, say that the Boers must return to the ways of their ancestors, and themselves work their farms with their own hands and those of their families. But the majority of the Afrikaners are no more prepared to give up the surplus value—that is, the profits —which they make out of their African labourers, than they are to abandon their ownership of the land to the Africans. “On the farms you hear sad tales of how difficult it is to keep Africans, even with the help of legislation, from drifting away to make rather more money in urban employment. No one at these managerial levels suggests that his workers—-or he—would be better off if there were a trek back to the Reserves. On the contrary the cry is for more cheap labour.” (The Times. 14/1 /55: succeeding references are also to The Times). The Nationalists, then, are in a dilemma. They have swept triumphantly into power on the cry of apartheid: they captured 86 of the 156 seats in the South African Parliament in 1948, and in 1953 they increased their members to 94. But even their own supporters would not tolerate them if they ever seriously tried to put apartheid into effect.

Big business

The Nationalists must also, when they are considering apartheid measures, reflect upon the opposition they would arouse among the English-speaking element in the Union. Although this element is now split among the United Party, the Federal Party, and the Liberal Party, it remains very powerful; for it contains within its ranks the owners of the country’s industries. The Times correspondent, coming from a country where the Capitalist class and the ruling class are merely two names for one body of people, finds this distinctly odd. “The situation is a somewhat curious one in which a Government and those who have voted it to power play relatively little part in the conduct of big business. . . . It remains true to say that the bulk of the business in the Union, especially at its directorial and managerial levels, is carried on by men of British stock or by other non-Afrikaner immigrants. The Afrikaner now governs: the minority makes the money in the towns.” (14/1/55). Curious or not, it is the fact; and the Capitalist class gains in economic power with every year that passes. “By 1939 South Africa was well advanced along a course from which, so far as can be seen, there is no turning back and which was transforming her from a land of primary producers and gold and diamond miners into a complex society in which secondary industries were looming more and more large. The process was accelerated by the war-time hold-up leading to demand for consumer and capital goods. Major industries were established or extended.” (11/1/55). Industrial expansion means larger towns and more workers in the factories. If we take four of the largest cities in the Union, Johannesburg, Cape Town. Durban, and Port Elizabeth, we find that between 1936 and 1946 the white population rose by 29%; the Cape Coloured population by 34%; the Asiatic population by 38%, and the Negro population by 71%. Recently Mr. Hepple, a South African M.P., speaking in Parliament, said that in 1936 there were only 175.000 Negroes in industry; now there are 500,000—nearly three times as many (9/2/55).

Joshua.

(To be continued)

Class and colour in South Africa - Part 2 (1955)

From the June 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1.

Hands off our workers

The South African Capitalist looks on the Negro not as competitive but as complementary. Already many Negroes have been drawn into industry as wage-workers; and those who have not form a valuable reserve on which to draw for future expansion, and to use as a threat in order to keep down wages. To the factory-owner in Cape Town or Durban, to the shareholder in the Rand mines or the Port Elizabeth car-assembly-works, Negro labour is an essential ingredient in his profits. He is, therefore, resolutely opposed to the Nationalists' schemes for apartheid.

The Government, although theoretically committed to apartheid, is thus faced with the fact that its opponents regard it as anathema, and that its own supporters are unenthusiastic about translating the ideal into the practical. Few whites are prepared to attack separate seating in buses or separate queues at the Post Office counter, but serious measures of apartheid have a much more mixed reception. Even the removal of the Sophiatown Natives to a distance of no more than 11 miles outside Johannesburg, with rail transport available to bring the workers into Johannesburg, has roused much hostility in English-speaking circles. British Capitalists sympathised with South African Capitalists over this interference with “their" workers, and British workers were able to enjoy the spectacle of the English Conservative Press apparently defending the rights of the South African proletariat.

Stagnation of Industry 

In all their seven years of power, the Nationalist Government have only produced one serious plan for apartheid. In the western part of Cape Province, the numbers of Negroes have increased since 1921 from 30,000 to 178,000. But in this area of South Africa, there was already a large population of Cape Coloured people. If apartheid was possible anywhere in South Africa, a start might be made on it here—so the Government reasoned —because even if the Bantu were removed, there would still be Cape Coloureds to do the work. Even this scheme, it will be noted, is not full-blown apartheid: for even if all the Negroes were forcibly ejected from western Cape Province, the whites would still rely on the Cape Coloured population; the Government did not dare propose that the Cape Coloureds too should be sacrificed to “apartness." As could have been expected, the plan came under heavy fire from the industrial interests. “The long-term Government plan for the removal of Africans from the western Cape which was announced on Friday by Dr. Eiselen, the Secretary for Native Affairs, has received a hostile reception from the spokesmen of industry, which depends heavily on native labour.  . . . The Cape Times to-day attacks the proposal on the ground that it is impracticable, as commerce, industry, and agriculture, are too dependent on African labour. .. . Natives at present do nearly all the unskilled labour in the western province.  . . . The Cape Times also argues that, if the new policy is seriously implemented, it must be accompanied by a control of industry as drastic as in any totalitarian country to avoid increasing labour needs" (18-1-55). In Parliament a former Minister for Native Affairs strongly attacked the Eiselen plan “as impracticable and likely to depress the living standards of both Coloured and Europeans, through the stagnation of commerce and industry" (21-5-55).

Where can it be done?

What was even more significant was that the proposal, although it was for only partial apartheid in only one part of a single province, and although the long-term nature of its implementation was stressed by Dr. Eiselen, received nothing more than lukewarm support from the Nationalist Party newspaper itself, Die Burger. Die Burger, the Nationalist newspaper, applauds the plan, but does not gloss over the difficulties. “Let us not be under any illusions," it says. “The natives are here because of the economy of the western province as it has evolved, and as it is to-day it needs their labour.” . . . Die Burger sees this matter as an important and perhaps decisive test of apartheid. There are fewer Africans in the western Cape than elsewhere in the European areas, and the western Cape has a large coloured working population. If the plan to reduce the number of Negroes here fails, where in South Africa, Die Burger asks, can it be done, and what then of the policy of progressive territorial separation? " (18-1-55).

The Nationalists receive electoral support not only from the Afrikaner farmers but also from the “poor whites” in the towns. These failures of white society listen eagerly to a party which proclaims that, low as they are, they can still look down on men of a different coloured skin. And those of them who work for wages fear that the Negroes will soon be able to do their jobs for less pay. With these people “apartheid" is a valuable rallying-cry for the Nationalists. But the landed interest is the mainstay of the Nationalist Party, and in the long run determines its policy. In these circumstances it seems probable that thorough-going apartheid will remain a word on the Nationalist banners rather than an item of their practical policy, just as in this country the Conservative Party, while remaining theoretically opposed to all nationalisation, nevertheless makes no effort to restore the coal mines and the railways to their private owners. 

Education

The difference of opinion between the landed class and the industrial interest over apartheid or the lack of it is then, perhaps, more apparent than real. But there are other issues where the two classes are divided by a deep gulf. Whereas the Afrikaner farmer will not hear of African ownership of land outside the Native Reserves, the capitalist has no such objection to it. Indeed, a worker who feels he has a stake in the country by his ownership of his house and garden is often a better worker than the completely propertyless man. He is rooted to one spot, and is less likely to go off to another job, leaving his employer with the trouble of training a successor. He can only buy a house with the help of a mortgage, and a worker who has regular repayments to make is less likely to go on strike than one who hasn't. On this question, then, there is a clear division of opinion.

But the self-interest of the two classes is most clearly in opposition in the sphere of education. In the eyes of the Afrikaner the Negro is and must remain merely a hewer of wood and a drawer of water; he should have the very little education needed to fit him for his task, and no more. For more education would lead him to consider himself as good a man as the Afrikaner, and would tempt him to agitate for a share in the land of South Africa more consonant with his numbers. But the Britisher sees the Negro as a workman at a modern factory bench or conveyor-belt; and modern methods of production need skilled and educated workers. Which view is to prevail? In the long run, there seems little doubt that capitalism's inevitable demand for educated workers will become more vocal and will eventually carry the day; but at present, the Afrikaners seem to be trying to put their theories, in this field at least, into practice. As a start, the Nationalist Government is making a determined effort to get all education into its own hands. Under the Bantu Education Act, the subsidies which previous governments have paid to high schools and industrial schools, are to be cut immediately by a quarter of their former figure, and may ultimately be stopped altogether (8-1-55). The Act is designed to take native education out of the control of the provincial authorities and the English-speaking churches, and put it into that of the State. In the State-run schools, the Bantu will have a “special education"—that is to say, an education which the Afrikaners hope will ensure that they never rise above their present lowly status.

Mr. Strauss, leader of the United Party, indicated recently that his party might be prepared to accept a compromise on the Native question. “The Native as such,” he remarked in a speech at Bloemfontein, “is not even a homogeneous entity. What is right for the primitive tribesman in Pondoland may be wrong for the educated and cultured Native professor. What would be necessary for the Native urban worker in Johannesburg would not be desirable for the labour tenant on the Transvaal platteland ” (13-1-55). This naive “You do what you want with your workers if we can do what we want with ours" offer has so far, it seems, awakened no response among the Nationalists.

Religion

The question of education is bound up with the question of religion. As usual, each of these two contending upper classes has the support of its own churches. The Afrikaners’ church is the Dutch Reformed Church, of which, it will be remembered, the former Prime Minister Malan, Doctor of Theology, was a pastor. The divines of this Church bend their energies to demonstrate, with the aid of Biblical quotation, how the white man is by nature superior to the black, and how he is thus clearly designated, in the eternal order of things laid down by the Almighty, to rule over him. This kind of rubbish is refuted by the Anglican and Catholic Churches, which depend for their existence on the support of the capitalist class; they therefore select other Biblical quotations to "show that the Bantu, with the help of and under the suzerainty of the particular church concerned, can become a reliable and responsible member of society. In mid-twentieth-century South Africa this means, in effect, that he can become a trustworthy wage-slave. The English-speaking churches are supported in this by their brethren overseas: many British clergymen have been able to gain a cheap reputation for liberality by descanting on the evils of the Nationalist administration in South Africa, while closing their eyes to the exploitation of the workers on their own doorsteps.

Colour and Class

The colour problem in South Africa is not distinct and separate from the other problems which arise inevitably out of a society which is based on private property. Under Socialism there will be no landowner, no capitalist, no poor white, no “worker": there will be no fear of competition for land or for jobs, no fear of a rival class, no fear of loss' of dividend, and therefore none of the hatred to which these fears give rise. When South Africans understand and want Socialism, their hatred for persons of a different colour will disappear; for no man, black or white, can continue any longer in his hatred when he understands the real reasons for it. To treat the colour-bar as an issue outside of and beyond the class- struggle, and to believe that it can receive any real solution while the class-divisions in society remain unresolved, is to stultify oneself at the very outset. The answer to South Africa's problems is the same as the answer to the problems of Britain, America, Russia: it is the introduction of a Socialist system of society.

Joshua.

The Revelations of Winston Churchill (1954)

From the June 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The contempt in which the British ruling class holds those over whom it rules is shown by the readiness with which it reveals the truth about its motives and actions in the Second World War only a few years after the event. This column has already remarked upon the revealing statements made since the end of the war about both the Battle of Britain and the invasion of Norway. Now Mr. Churchill himself, the author of those stirring speeches which were so successful in inducing the British working class to fight the battles of the British capitalists for them, has made some extraordinary revelations in his last volume of the history of the war, “Triumph and Tragedy.”

When Churchill met Stalin in Moscow in 1944, they both abandoned the wordy inanities with which they had exhorted their followers to greater efforts, and got down to the business of the real reasons for which the war was fought. Among these reasons the situation in the Balkans in 1939 ranked high. Hitler's successive conquests of Austria, Czechoslovakia and part of Poland gave rise to fears that he was about to begin another "Drang nach Osten,” the drive to the east which had been high on the Kaiser’s programme. Britain wished to conserve her influence over Greece and over the Balkans generally; and Russia was determined not only to keep the half of Poland which she had taken in 1939, but also to extend her hegemony over the rest of Eastern Europe. So when Churchill and Stalin, as the representatives of the victorious ruling classes of Britain and Russia respectively, met at Moscow, they sat down to business with no illusions as to why the other had fought the war.

Blue Pencil
Churchill wrote on a sheet of paper the respective shares which he proposed that each country should have in the various Balkan countries. He suggested that Rumania should be ninety per cent. Russian and ten per cent. British; that Greece should be ninety per cent. British and ten per cent. Russian; and that similar divisions of influence should be made in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the rest. He pushed the sheet across the table to Stalin. "Stalin took a blue pencil, and made a large tick upon it; and passed it back. It was all settled, says Churchill, in no more time than it takes to set it down ” (Reynolds News, 25/4/54). There was no discussion on either side, according to Churchill’s own account, as to how this dividing up of smaller countries (most of which had been on the Allied side in the war) squared with the lofty motives which each had repeatedly given in public speeches as the sole reasons for which the Allies were fighting the war. Does the reader remember the old gag about “the independence of small nations”? No mention of that here. Does the reader remember how the National Anthems of these small countries used to be played to us regularly by the B.B.C. to show us how intimately this country had their interests at heart? Now they were not even called in to give their approval of the settlement reached as to their future by their big brotherly allies. If these Balkan countries had been told, no doubt they would have raised a cry of "No division without representation" but they were not even told.

Honour Among Thieves

Churchill and Stalin kept their respective bargains. When it looked as if the left-wing .political party EAM, and its guerilla supporter ELAS, was going to take power in Greece, Churchill ordered the British Army and the Royal Air Force into action; thus was Greece saved for its Anglo-American future. And not a word of protest came from Russia, or appeared in the Russian press. Similarly, when the Russian army of occupation in Rumania saw to it that the Communist Party took power and threw King Michael out, there was no interference from Britain.

All this is retold frankly by Churchill. Apparently his scorn for the workers is such that he has no fear of any adverse effect on morale in a Third World War; he is not afraid that the workers, having seen how hollow were the speeches made and articles written in the Second World War, might come to think that those in future wars were just as hypocritical. And such is the hold of propaganda on the mass of the working class, he is probably right

Joshua.

The Passing Show: Crime and Punishment (1954)

The Passing Show Column from the June 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crime and Punishment

The recent campaign in the Soviet Union against crime, including the restoration of the death penalty for murder, is being taken in some circles to show that crime is something “inherent in human nature,” and that the early Socialist pioneers were wrong when they said that in a Socialist society there would be no crime. But the people who take up this point of view do not see that in order for their reasoning to be valid, they must first show that there is a Socialist society in the Soviet Union. Far from the existence of crime proving anything about Socialism, it is itself another demonstration that there cannot be Socialism in Russia. The Stalinists themselves, who profess to believe that there is Socialism in Russia, abandon—as they have often done before—their materialist philosophy in order to explain it, and say it is due to elements which are corrupt or hostile to the regime. But before Socialism can be established, it is necessary to have a great majority who understand and want it, and to whom therefore the notion of crime is foreign; and Socialism will abolish crime because it will abolish the material conditions which cause it.

When Stalinists admit that there is crime in Russia they are admitting the falseness of their own view of the nature of Russian society.

On Guard

During the recent correspondence in The Times about the hydrogen bomb, one reader wrote that “the British Army remains unruffled. This last week-end I attended Territorial Army training—the morning was passed with lectures on the use and effect of the atomic bomb; in the afternoon we practised sword drill" (10-4-54). It is good to know that our generals are directing their minds to the problems that beset us.

Presumably, in the last ghastly moment of atomic annihilation, we are supposed to cry “‘Touché !” The present regime cannot guarantee that we will survive; but it is at least trying to teach us how to die like gentlemen.

Joshua.