South African (Cosatu).
The initiation by the ANC of the call for organs of dual powér - street committees, area committees, correct next step in the struggle in The dynamic of the struggle in South Africa is clear. Starting with elementary demands against the new constitution of Botha - the ANC has increasingly bullt up a united front of all those prepared to fight against the apartheid regime.
organisational Iorm united front, and the scope of its mass actions, has progressively deepened. The 1 May general strike in turn was the most powerful action of the working class in South African history.
The ANC has not gained weight in this mass movement because of correctness on all tactical issues. On the contrary it has made major tactical mistakes _ being outtlanked both at the time of the Soweto uprising in 1976 and by the initial rise of the Pti duc unions (in particular by the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu)). Revolt But the ANC has gained increasing dominance because of decisive political positions which are indispensible ally strategy in South Africa which it is correct against its critics.
The first of these is non-racialism. This was a basic position the ANC defended against both the split of the Pan African Congress in 1959 and in regard to the trade unions. It was this principle, adopted independently by Fosatu, which allowed vergence of the trade unions which created Cosatu.
Second the ANC has fought for the united front of all those who are prepared to struggle on the basis of the democratic demands against the apartheid regime. This was explicit in the creation of the UDF. In a higher form it applies to the creation of the street committees and other organisations of the same type.
These positions not unconnected. Nor are they cidental. They flow from the ANC's definition of the struggle in South Africa that democratic revolution revolution which must tasks, including the creation of a nation state, that were carried out in western Europe in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 16th-19th centuries. These national tasks were also carried out in Kussia through the October revolution 1917.
The relation of such a character of revolution to the principles applied by the ANC in the fight against aparthied is clear. A national democratic revolution, by definition, is carrying out tasks of a capitalist revolution. It, - the struggle LOS a tree capitalist' obstacles. of this In kussia, pre-capitalist its question through self-determination.
South obstacles Black workers to 1cvululivllal y - and on are the same in South Africa.
the con"law of dispossession', of the ANC are CaCwas the whereby the national that is a South Africa was ensured.
carry out Black population democratic foundation. white capitalist ownership among other tasks, creates the condiexchange of commodities by smashing down all 'prefor example, the national democratic tasks of the revolution included smashing to pieces the of serf/ landlord relations in agriculture. also involved resolving the national destroying 'great duced Russian' domination of the oppressed nationalities of the Tsarist state and establishing the right of nations to Africa differs in that the normal commodity relations were created by a specific form of capitalist state, rather than 1917 predating it. The legal prohibition of Black land ownership, the inability of vivals cell power on a normal or equal basis with whites, the fact that the Black community has no rigat to vole ur possess political power even of a bourgeois democratic kind, were all created by capitalism itself. But while the origin of such relations differs from Russia, the tasks involved on this field, that of smashing all such relations to pieces, Non-racialism is the ideology and scale position of such a revolution in the concrete conditions of South Africa. The unity in the struggle against apartheid is the correct unity of all those who are prepared to fight these relations and the state system that defends them.
The significance of the land question in this framework in the revolution in South Africa is evident. The , the 1913 Land Act, which granted 86 per cent of the land in South Africa to the whites, fundamental mechanism Sube CoOLa oppression of the Black majority of Deprived of access to land, the was forced to food become a supply of super exploited cheap labour for the white owned The entire later structure of aparthieed was based on this original Without destroying without creating a Black farming class which replaces the white dominated capitalist agriculture, it is impossible to secure freedom for the Black maThis demand for land is correctly summed up in the ANC's Freedom Charter as: 'The land shall be shared among those who work it! Restrictions of land ownershio on a racial basis shall be ended , and all the land redivided amongst those who work it to banish famine and land hunger.?
This task, from a social/economic point of view. is that of a capitalist revolution. The economic system proby such revolution agriculture in South Africa will be one based essentially on free commodity While revolution.
semi-feudal landlordism etc -relations and proper alla large distribution, Soviet scale industry elementary capitalist, production agriculture.
This system was not a 'concession' by the Bolsheviks but entirely correct Any attempt to leap over a phase of commodity/small capitalist relations the revolution in Hungary the was crushed.
peasalls, economically Economic Policy forcible was catastrophe back The revolution that is occurring in South establish free access to commodity productoi agriculture for the Black majority well as African non racial nation state.
class alliances in the revolution. Even a directly socialist revolution is made in by the working class leading the petty bourgeoisie - not against it.
tion in South Africa, also, not merely leading the petty bourgeosie, will actually create a massive Black petty-bourgeoisie — for in strict class terms a Black peasantry, • sur- what will be created by the revolution on the land in South Africa is a rural petty-bourgeoisie. in doubtless be exemplary state farms, encouragement of co-operatives etc, scale the fundamental class that will come state into existence through the revolution on the land is a Black peasantry.
Power the criteria of what would constitute an abortion of the tasks of the national democrane would mean, uprooting of agriculture was not carried through. That, as in Zimbabwe or Kenya, the white capitalists dominate, roads, into transfer of political power, in some form, to the Black population.
what type of state can carry through this gigantic revolution on the land. It is here that Ernest Harsch's contains much valuable factual intormation, goes completely off the rails. For it attempts to put the land question into a theoretical framework for which there is no factual evidence in the twentieth was Lenin's "revolutionary of the dictatorship peasantry.
troduction and an article to which the pamphlet refers — Jack Barnes' "The Coming Revolution in South Africa' which appeared in New International Vol 2 No 2.
Many articles on this have engaged in a great deal of exchange of quotations between Lenin Soviet and Trotsky. But by itself that is empty scholasticism.
and peasants 'During Africa will for the first time South African letariat:
Socially creating a single south But both This also relates to the question of uncel The national democratic revoluthe Call y revolution really to its conclusion.' As Trotsky put it in Per manent Revolution: "The bourgeois revolution was realised (in Russia) as a coalition of workers the Kerensky (February to October 1917)? No, during the first period after October. Is that right? It is. But, as we now know it was not realised in the form of a democratic dictatorship, but in the form of the dictatorship of the prothe land question Russia was resolvea in two waves.
waves were carried single, proletarian, . state