During the course of the nineteenth century imperial policy in South Africa fluctuated in accordance with conflicts of interest and policy within the British ruling class, the administrations in power in Britain and the High Commissioners appointed to Cape Town. Some, like Sir Harry Smith (1847-1852) were aggressively expansionist - he extended the borders of the Cape Colony to include the Transkei and annexed the Orange Free State, renamed the Orange River Sovereignty. He was replaced in 1852 by Sir George Cathcart, with instructions to disengage from the OFS and cut British involvement to the limit. His successor, Sir George Grey (1846-61) had far-reaching plans for a British Federation of South Africa, but these were eventually turned down by Whitehall as too costly.
The closing third of the century, however, British policy was decisively affected not only by the ascendancy of monopoly finance capital at home and inter-imperialist rivalries for Africa, but also by dramatic events of world significance in South Africa itself.
These were the discovery of fabulously rich mineral resources beneath the surface: diamonds in Griqualand West (1870) followed by the opening of the Witwatersrand gold mines (1888).
The discovery of diamonds, and particularly that of underground resources of vast potential at what is now Kimberley, brought a rush of wealth-seekers and work-seekers from all over the world. Monopoly soon took over. The host of smaller claimholders who had participated in the early 'rush' to the diamond fields were bought or squeezed out. De Beers Consolidated Mines established a firm control over the Kimberley mines which were soon producing ninety per cent of the world supply of diamonds and by the end of a century had netted their owners no less than £700 million in gross returns.
The diamond fields at Kimberley changed the face of Cape Colony, just as the goldfields of Johannesburg, 18 years later would transform the whole of South Africa. The white workers who flocked to the diggings from all over the country, from Europe and even from America fought bitter struggles - on the one hand class battles against De Beers over wages and conditions; on the other to retain their privileged position in relation to the thousands of Coloured and African workers likewise attracted to employment on the mines. The African workers too entered the field of class organisation and struggle, coming out on strike for higher wages as early as 1882.
The new-rich diamond millionaires, backed by powerful financial institutions in Britain and elsewhere, became immensely powerful political figures in South Africa and abroad. The head of De Beers was Cecil Rhodes, a ruthless adventurer, obsessed by dreams of British imperial glory and boundless personal ambition. He became Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (1890). With the blessing of the British government he established his own private company (the British South African Chartered Company) with its own private army, which invaded and carved up huge slices of African territory north of the Limpopo River, named with colossal megalomania 'Rhodesia', and attempted unsuccessfully to invade and capture the Transvaal.
The period from 1870 until the end of the century was marked by a wave of aggressive wars launched by Great Britain and its Cape Colony to conquer and dominate the entire sub-continent.
A brief chronology describes the process.
Griqualand West, the area of the diamond fields, was a country occupied by peoples of Khoikhoi Tswana and Coloured descent whose sovereignty under Chief Waterboer was recognised by treaty with Britain. In 1871 the treaty was set aside and the territory annexed by Britain. (In 1887-8 the Griqua, Tswana and Khoikhoi joined forces to gain independence; the rising was branded as 'rebellion' and savagely suppressed.)
In 1873 a war was waged by Britain against the Hlubi people under Langalibalele in Natal.
In 1877 - following a major defeat of the Commandos of the Transvaal (then the South African Republic) by the Pedi under Sekhukhune British troops entered Pretoria without resistance and annexed the Transvaal. (In 1880, after the British troops had overcome Pedi resistance, the Transvaal Boers unilaterally declared independence, recognised de facto by Britain.)
In 1879, following their shattering defeat by the Zulu at the Battle of Isandhlwana the British moved into Zululand in force and imposed a peace which robbed the Zulu of most of their independence. (Zululand was annexed outright in 1887 and handed over to Natal in 1897.)
In the same year 1879 the Cape Colony annexed Fingoland, Idutywa and the independent Coloured Republic of Griqualand East under Adam Kok. With British approval the Colony expanded to include all remaining African areas west of Natal, concluding with Pondoland (1894.)
In 1884 a new factor appeared, hastening Britain's drive to dominate South Africa: the annexure of South-West Africa by Germany. Britain moved. fast to establish the western frontier. She annexed southern Botswana outright as 'British Bechuanaland' (consolidated into the Cape Colony in 1895 by agreement between Whitehall and Cape Town). Northern Bechuanaland (present-day Botswana) was declared a British Protectorate.
In 1890 settlers of Rhodes's 'British South Africa Company' invaded Mashonaland, followed by penetration into Matabeleland. Between 1896 and 1897, prolonged wars of resistance were waged by the peoples of present-day Zimbabwe.
Also in 1890 Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic imposed a joint administration over Swaziland.
The last area of independent African resistance was not overcome until 1898, a year before the Boer War, when with the aid of African conscripts the South African Republic defeated the Venda.
The opening of the Witwatersrand gold mines (1886) was of still greater import for the future of South Africa than that of the diamond mines. Money and men poured into the Transvaal. Within two years the forty four gold mines with a nominal capital of 6,800,000 were producing an annual output of 1,300,000. By 1890 the gold mines were employing over 100,000 workers: white immigrants mostly from Europe and Africans housed on mine property in the grim, prison-like bachelor compounds of the type which hall originated at Kimberley. From a primitive mining camp, Johannesburg mushroomed to dwarf the capital Pretoria and become the greatest city in Southern Africa. Over the next hundred years the Witwatersrand was to produce 6,000 million worth of gold; the bulk of the capitalist world's supply. From the start the mining industry was dominated at monopoly finance capital. A handful of big companies dominated by the Kimberley mining millionaires, together with British and other foreign finance-capitalist institutions, controlled the industry and, combined in the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, rapidly became the most Powerful concentration of capitalist Dower in the country.
The discovery of this veritable El Dorado determined British Imperialism to secure political and economic domination of the Boer Republics in the Transvaal and the OFS In 1895 a conspiracy was hatched between Rhodes, the Cape Premier, and the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, to send in a raiding party from 'Rhodesia' to the Transvaal (the 'Jameson Raid'). But the plot was discovered, a planned uprising by pro-British elements in Johannesburg was nipped in the bud. The venture misfired hopelessly. Rhodes was made the scapegoat and dropped from public office, while preparations were made for full-scale war against the Republics.
The 'Boer War' broke out in October 1899.
The war was an expensive venture for British imperialism. 450,000 troops were sent to South Africa, of whom over 20,000 lost their lives. It cost the British taxpayers 250 million to secure the interests of the mining magnates. British prestige suffered incalculable damage; for the war was fought with the utmost barbarity. Boer women and children were confined in concentration camps, their homes and farms destroyed, before they could be brought to surrender; while the gallantry and brilliant guerilla strategy of the Afrikaners a small nation defying the world's greatest imperial power in defence of their independence won them the admiration and support of the democratic world, which knew little of the background: the dispossession and enslavement of the real owners of the highveld.
Following initial setbacks British forces occupied Johannesburg in May 1900, the Boer President Kruger was exiled and the annexation of the Republics was proclaimed. But the Boers refused to accept defeat; they carried on a stubborn guerilla war under commando leaders such as Generals de Wet, de la Ray and Botha for a further two years.
Peace was signed, after prolonged negotiations, by the Treaty of Vereeniging (31 May 1902). Among the principal negotiators were Lord Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner for South Africa and Governor of the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies; and Jan Christiaan Smuts, once an ardent supporter of Cecil Rhodes, who had been appointed States Attorney by Kruger and had saved as a commando general, leading a guerilla raid in the Cape Colony towards the end of the Boer War.
No Africans were consulted about this treaty. British war propaganda had made much of the semi-slavery and harsh anti-African policies of the Boer Republics, but under British rule the legality of Boer ownership of land stolen by force and fraud was confirmed; the white supremacy laws of the Republics left unaltered. A period of military government was to be followed 'at the earliest possible date' by civil government. According to Article 8 of the Treaty of Vereeniging 'The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.' 'Self-government' therefore meant rule by the white minority.
In December 1906 the British Parliament approved a constitution for the Transvaal with a franchise confined to white men and the Het Volk Party, headed by Generals Botha and Smuts took office. A similar constitution for the Orange River Colony was adopted six months later and resulted in the election of Abraham Fischer as Prime Minister.
South Africa is not a colony but an independent state. Yet the masses of our people enjoy neither independence nor freedom. The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain, in 1910, was not a victory over the forces of colonialism and imperialism. It was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of people of South Africa, but into the hands of the White minority alone. The evils of colonialism, in so far as the non-White majority was concerned, were perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them.
The Road to South African Freedom
Not for the first time, nor the last, British imperialism had purchased peace at the expense of other people's land and liberties. Despite the differences between them which erupted into the war of 1889-1902, British imperialism and Boer colonialism found common ground in the destruction of African land-ownership and traditional societies; and the enforced exploitation of African labour. That was the basis of the Treaty of Vereeniging. lt was carried forward in the period of military government under Milner whose policy was 'a self-governing white community supported by . . . black labour from Cape Town to the Zambezi.'
The alliance was consolidated by the formation in 1910 of the Union of South Africa. Following an all-white 'National Convention' representing the legislatures of the Transvaal, Cape, Natal and Orange Colonies, the British Parliament approved against the opposition of the then small Labour Party and the Irish Republicans a constitution providing for an all-white Parliament for the new self-governing Dominion.
In three of the four Provinces (the former Colonies) only whites could vote. In the fourth, following the tradition of the Cape Colony, a certain number of 'qualified' Coloured and African men (a fraction of the electorate) were allowed the privilege of choosing which representative 'of pure European descent' to vote for.
Reflecting the economic predominance of the Transvaal, Generals Botha and Smuts headed the first Union Cabinet, representing the alliance of imperialism, mining monopolies and the burgeoning class of capitalist large-scale farmers. Their rising prosperity depended upon speeding the flow of labour at the lowest possible rates of pay to mines and farms. The accomplishment of this objective was, and has remained, the main preoccupation of the South African capitalist class and its government.
Even before the Boer War, the Chamber of Mines had repeatedly petitioned the Republican government to secure, by coercion, taxation and other methods a more ample supply of African labour. The mining houses having agreed among themselves to cut wages (the notorious maximum average wage schedule, still in operation) found difficulty in getting Africans to come in sufficient numbers to do the hard, dangerous and unhealthy, unskilled jobs on the mines for a beggarly 30s. a month. In 1903, after the war, which had temporarily closed down the mines, a Commission appointed by the Milner government submitted a report which in the words of L. Bernstein ('The Great Conspiracy' Liberation, Nos. 11 and 12, Johannesburg 1956) expresses 'perhaps more clearly than any other document, the attitude of the Chamber of Mines and its agents to the African labourer'.
'The scarcity of native labour' it reported, 'is due first and foremost to the fact that the African native tribes are for the most part primitive peasant communities who possess exceptional facilities for the regular and full supply of their . . . needs . . . The African natives are in possession or occupation of large areas of land. No considerable change can reasonably be anticipated in their industrial habits until a great modification of these conditions has been brought about.'
Concrete proposals included 'compulsion, direct or indirect changes in native tribal system or changes in land tenure . . . higher taxes . . . The more weighty proposals to improve the supply (of African labour) recommended that the existing native social system should be attacked with the object of modifying or destroying it.'
These 'weighty proposals' were indeed to be implemented. It was a lengthy process involving the unification of South Africa (1910) the Native Land Act (1913) and the subsequent enforcement of innumerable anti-African laws and practices by the successive governments of the Union and subsequently the Republic of South Africa. In the meantime the need was met by the massive importation of indentured semi-slave labour from outside, especially from Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) and China. The labour force in 1906 consisted of 94,000 Africans, 51,000 Chinese and 18,000 whites. But this practice, reminiscent of the slave trade (the Chinese labourers, recruited with the connivance of the subservient Chinese government of the day under pressure from the British Tory administration, received five shillings pay for a sixty-hour week) led to a storm of protest not only in South Africa but also in Britain. It became a major election issue in 1905 when the Tory Chamberlain government was defeated by the Liberal Party. The Chinese were repatriated by 1907.
The defeat of the separated and ill-equipped African tribes was followed by a rapidly-growing national and political consciousness among the people, expressed particularly by the few among them who had the opportunity to-acquire modern education and contact with the outside world. Imbumba Yama Afrika, the first African political organisation, was established in the Eastern Cape in 1882 by African teachers, clergymen and others; two years later the first African newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu (Voice of the Black People) was started with financial backing from white liberals, by John Tengo Jabavu (1859-1921), who also established the 'Native Electoral Association' representing that relatively small minority of Africans able to qualify for the property and educational standards required to vote for the Cape Legislative Assembly.
Similar organisations and newspapers were founded in the other colonies by men such as Rev. J. L. Dube in Natal, T. Makipela in the OFS and Dr. P. l. Seme, a graduate of Columbia University (USA), in the Transvaal.
The approach of Union, and the colour-bar constitution adopted by the all-white National Convention, stimulated the unification of these early organisations. The draft Union Constitution was published in February 1909. Within a month African leaders from all four colonies met in a national convention at Bloemfontein. It was decided to send a deputation to the British Parliament to demand rejection of the anti-African provisions of the South Africa Act and the substitution of a non-colour bar constitution for the Union.
The deputation was joined by representatives of the pioneer Coloured people's organisation, the African People's Organisation, headed by its president, Dr. Abdul Abdurahman. Also accompanying them as legal adviser was W. P. Schreiner, a former Cape Prime Minister and brother of the novelist and pioneer socialist, Olive Schreiner.
The ignoring of this deputation by the major British political Parties, the establishment of the Union under the anti-African Smuts-Botha government, and its first major onslaught on the Africans' remaining land rights, the Native Land Bill of 1912, brought home to Africans throughout the country the imperative need for an effective national organisation which could unite the people, regardless of tribal origin or language, for an effective struggle against white minority domination. A clarion call for unity was issued by Dr. Seme:
'The demon of racialism, the aberrations of the Xhosa-Fingo raids, the animosity that exists between Zulus and the Tsongas, the Basotho and every other Native, must be buried and forgotten . . . We are one people.'
The call met with an overwhelmingly favourable response. The African Congresses which had been formed in the Transvaal, Natal and Free State, the pioneer African movements in the Cape, and the traditional rulers of many African peoples approved the planned formation of a single organisation to represent their interests.
It was this spirit of African unity that inspired the foundation on 8 January 1912 of the African National Congress. The foundation conference was a most notable occasion in South African history, and an outstanding achievement for the times.
Many of the moving spirits were patriotic African intellectuals: lawyers like Seme, A. Mangena, R. W. Msimang, G. D. Montsioa, ministers like Dube and Rubusana, teachers like Sol. T. Plaatje, the first secretary general.
The great mass of the people in the countryside were represented by Chiefs who in that period were still able to voice their interests. Modelled in part on the British and US Constitutions, the first ANC Constitution provided for an 'Upper House' of Chiefs, many of whom were present at the founding Conference. Letsie II of Lesotho accepted the position of honourary president as did the chiefs of the Kgatla, Lozi, Ngwato, Rolong, Tembu, Pondo and Zulu people.
From its inception the African National Congress (the original name was 'The South African National Native Congress.') conducted campaigns of mass meetings arousing the people against the provisions of the land Act and other grievances, particularly the extension of pass laws to women in the OFS It was a pioneer in the cause of the unity of all African peoples, not only in the Union but throughout the continent, evidenced in its slogan (Mayibuye i'Afrika! Return Africa!).
In its earlier period the leadership was predominantly composed of members of the literate minority of men who could speak English and of traditional chiefs. Its pronouncements were usually of studied moderation. This led many observers to underestimate the actual and potential significance of the Congress.
Yet the ANC had a profoundly revolutionary objective the building of a united African nation aiming consciously at liberation and the assertion of its rights. It truly represented the aspirations and interests of the masses. The establishment of the ANC was an historic and courageous action which inevitably led to its development into a fighting liberation movement aiming at the revolutionary conquest of people's power.
The Indian people also had embarked upon a series of struggles against race discrimination: the common lot of all 'non-whites' in South Africa.
The Indian community in Natal descendants of those who had been indentured to work in the sugar-fields and others found themselves increasingly subjected to the South African brand of discrimination and insult meted out to every one whose skin was not white. In 1893 a young Indian lawyer, Mohandas K. Gandhi, came to South Africa on legal business. Shocked and moved by the treatment of Natal Indians, he began to organise the foundations of the Natal Indian Congress. It was the beginning of a life devoted to public affairs. Contrary to his intentions, Gandhi did not leave South Africa until 1914. In the Transvaal, under the British colonial administrations of Milner and his successor, Lord Selborne the anti-Asian laws of the Republic had been tightened up and extended. (The Orange Free State had totally banned Asians from entering a barrier which continued under British rule and to the present day.) A new series of anti-Asian measures was introduced by the Botha-Smuts government as soon as it took office in the Transvaal in 1907.
The Indians of Natal and the Transvaal responded with a series of spectacular passive resistance campaigns inspired by Gandhi's developing philosophy of 'satyagraha' and non-violent resistance. Whatever their philosophical background, these campaigns united the Indian community and mobilised them for mass political action. They flouted Smuts's laws and courted imprisonment. In 1913 a massive and completely effective strike of Indian workers was accompanied by a mass march across the forbidden frontier between Natal and the Transvaal. These actions aroused the enthusiasm and political consciousness of the Indian community to a high pitch. They also focussed Indian and world opinion on the ugly reality of South African racialism and won widespread support from democrats of all South African national groups. Even the Transvaal Federation of Trades was moved to a rare expression of solidarity across the colour line when it adopted a resolution on the 1913 strike of Natal Indians expressing 'sympathy with the Asiatics in their struggle' and demanding 'that no white man scab on them.'
Gandhi left for his homeland in 1914. There he continued the quest for liberation he had begun in South Africa, in a manner which has become a part of Indian and world history. He left a legacy of self-sacrificing mass struggle, and the foundation of organisations in the Transvaal and Natal which, in their later development as the South African Indian Congress, wrote stirring chapters into the story of the freedom struggle.
In the early years of Dutch settlement at the Cape no rigid social distinctions on lines of colour were made. The colonists mingled and intermarried with the Khoikhoi and other Africans, and also with those former slaves from Indonesia ('Malays') and elsewhere who had gained freedom. Colour prejudice and white chauvinism grew with the wars of dispossession against Africans, and the desire of the white minority to
monopolise land, property and opportunities. A national group developed the Coloured people increasingly the victims of harsh racialist laws and practices which relegated most of them and their descendants to the status of urban and rural wage workers, and denied them equal rights.
On many occasions the Coloured people fought militant battles for their rights. There were slave rebellions in the Cape. Coloured slaves conscripted to fight the Xhosa mutinied and joined forces with their fellow-Africans. Large numbers emigrated beyond the borders of the Cape Colony where, calling themselves the Griquas, after the name of a Khoikhoi tribe, they established states under Waterboer, Adam Kok and other leaders, whose independence was recognised until the white colonists and British imperialism coveted their land.
But most of them remained in the Western Cape, where they formed the bulk of the working population in town and country, and where, through continuous struggle, they won a measure of civil rights expressed particularly in the right of men of colour to vote and even to stand for election to the Cape Parliament and town councils, even though the franchise excluded all but the wealthiest and best-educated members of the community.
The pioneer political movement among the Coloured people was the African People's Organisation, established in Cape Town in 1902, whose chief spokesman, for many years was Dr. Abdul Abdurahman (1872-1940), continuously re-elected President for thirty-six years until his death. The APO, as reflected by its name, identified itself with the indigenous masses and was a pioneer of the concept of a united front of the oppressed people against white minority rule. 'If Europeans persist in their policy of oppression there will one day arise a solid mass of Black and Coloured humanity whose demands will be irrepressible,' Abdurahman wrote as early as 1909. When the APO took part, together with African leaders, in the joint deputation to Britain in 1909 in a vain attempt to prevent the British Parliament from approving the South Africa Act, Dr. Abdurahman was impressed by and drew far-reaching conclusions from the solidarity shown by the British Labour Party with the oppressed people of South Africa. The organisation's paper, the APO appealed to the predominantly white trade union and labour movement in South Africa to show a like solidarity with their non-white fellow-workers. 'Too long have black and white been played off against one another,' it wrote in 1909. 'It is to the Socialists that we must look for help in our fight against a class tyranny that deprives us of political freedom.'
The arrogant rejection of such appeals by most of the political and trade union leaders of the white workers strengthened the influence within the APO of those middle-class elements who sought to win concessions through compromises and election deals with sections of the white bourgeoisie, and thus to reduce the Coloured liberation movement to a pawn in the game of the parliamentary politicians.
Rejection of an alliance with the liberation movements was implicit in the origin and character of the labour movement consisting mainly of European immigrants, which had developed in the four colonies which constituted South Africa. As early as the nineteenth century, branches of British trade unions had been established in Cape Town and other coastal cities. The era of gold and diamonds, of modern imperialism, saw the centre of economic development transferred decisively to the north. The mines became the arena of fierce class struggle where monopoly capitalism confronted the tens of thousands of immigrant workers in the De Beers-owned and run town of Kimberley and in the turbulent 'mining-camp' atmosphere of the Witwatersrand.
Imbued with the spirit of British craft unionism as well as with colour and national prejudice, the miners and other white workers, though they fought courageously against the mining millionaires and their government, showed small sympathy with the exploitation and oppression of their African fellow-workers. Strikes were frequent, prolonged and often bloody.
These struggles came to a head in May 1913, when 68 thousand Rand miners downed tools demanding trade union recognition and an 8-hour day - a strike which was not broken until the government called in police and troops, killing a number of workers in street clashes. In December the same year the Transvaal Federation of Trades called for a general strike, in protest against the decision by Smuts, Minister of Defence, to declare martial law to break a stoppage by railwaymen. Smuts' reply was to bring an army of 70,000 men, arrest nine union leaders and illegally deport them to England, arousing a storm of protest at home and in Britain.
The development of trade unions was accompanied as in other capitalist countries by the formation of working class political parties with more or less clearly defined socialist objectives.
In 1902 a branch of the British Social Democratic Federation was established in the Cape, and a similar group was formed in Johannesburg in the same year. The internationalist spirit of the Cape Social Democrats was attested by a public meeting in solidarity with the 1905 Russian Revolution.
It is interesting to recall that a message to this meeting was received from the novelist Olive Schreiner, who had formed a close friendship with the Marx family when visiting London, and never lost her socialist convictions. Her message on the 1905 Revolution declared:
'We are witnessing the beginning of the greatest event that has taken place in the history of humanity during the last centuries'.
Other socialist organisations in the colonies before Union were usually branches of British bodies, such as the Independent Labour Party in the Transvaal, the Clarion Fellowship in Natal, and on the extreme Left the Socialist Labour Party.
The Transvaal elections of 1907 saw the emergence, for the first time, of the labour movement as a serious electoral force. The Labour Representation Committee was backed by the Witwatersrand Trades Council under the chairmanship of W. H. Andrews and most of the socialist organisations. It contested seven out of the thirteen seats in the Transvaal, and won three of them, polling 5,216 of a total of 13,180 votes cast. This encouraging start gave a great fillip to the labour movement and led to the formation in 1909 of the South African Labour Party, which anticipated the Act of Union in 1910 by becoming the first political party to be established on a nationwide scale transcending the former colonial boundaries.
Nearly all the country's trade unions and socialist societies joined forces in launching the new Party a notable exception being the Socialist Labour Party. The socialists and trade unionists who formed the Labour Party were united in their determination to gain adequate workers' representation in the Union Parliament and the various provincial and local councils but in little else. From its inception deep differences existed; opinions varying from right-wing opportunism, typified by Frederick Creswell, former mine-manager and an ardent upholder of 'white labour' and British imperialism, to forces supporting socialist internationalism on the Left.
The latter succeeded in writing a socialist objective into the Party's constitution and securing its affiliation to the Second International. But on the all-important question of the Party's attitude towards the oppressed African majority, right-wing views prevailed. Claiming that radical approaches to 'the native question' would scare away the voters, they succeeded in deferring indefinitely any definition of policy on the central problem of the country leaving the Labour Party in effect to trail behind the white chauvinist policies of the bourgeois Parties.
Although represented in Parliament, the Labour Party raised no effective protest against the Native Land Act passed in 1913. Nevertheless, the opposition to it headed by the ANC, the inspiring struggle of the Indian people in the same year; the violent clashes between the Transvaal workers and the Botha-Smuts government and perhaps most effective a massive strike of African mine labourers for better pay: all these events left a deep impression on the labour movement.
The mood was reflected at the 1913 Labour Party conference, which decided, though not without strong opposition, to admit Coloured members. It also elected an executive far more advanced and principled than its predecessor.
Three of them in particular were destined to play an outstanding role in the revolutionary working class movement of South Africa: the chairman, W H Andrews, the secretary. D. I. Jones. and S. P. Bunting.
'The experience of the war, like the experience of many crises in history, of any great calamity and any sudden tum in human life, stuns and breaks some people, but enlightens and tempers others.'
LENIN, The Collapse of the Second International
As with most of the Parties of the Second International, the onset of the first world war brought out within the Labour Party the deep internal conflict between revolutionary, internationalist elements on the one hand and opportunist, jingoist elements on the other.
Unlike the leaders of most of the Parties affiliated to the Second International, the South African Labour Party remained faithful to the well-known anti-war Basle resolution of the International in the drafting of which Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg had participated.(1) As early as 2 August 1914 the SALP Administrative Council, comprising delegates from branches, adopted a resolution expressing its
'protest against the capitalist governments of Europe in fomenting a war which can only benefit the International armaments manufacturers' ring and other enemies of the working class, and appeals to the workers of the world to organise and refrain from participating in this unjust war.'
Similar resolutions were adopted by Social-Democratic organisations in the Cape and Natal, and by the trade unions united in the S. A. Industrial Federation.
This militant stand was challenged after the Botha-Smuts government decided in September 1914 to join Britain and invaded German South West Africa (not without opposition from Afrikaner nationalists, some of whom even staged an ill-fated and brutally suppressed rebellion.)
Right-wingers in the Labour Party intrigued furiously within the branches to whip up jingoism and drag the Party behind the government and the war effort of British imperialism. Their leader, Creswell volunteered for military service and was promoted Colonel; the Party organ The Worker, edited by his colleague, W. Wybergh, campaigned publicly to whip up war fever.
The internationalists fought back. In September 1914, S. P. Bunting, Ivon Jones, Colin Wade and others within the Labour Party established the War on War League. Much of its propaganda was revolutionary and socialist in content.
A pamphlet 'Keeping the Red Flag Flying' (March 1915) addressed by the League to members of the Labour Party, emphasised 'the profound opposition between socialism and militarism, the fundamentally capitalist origin of war, the essentially International character of working class solidarity'. Recalling the famous slogan, 'Workers of the World Unite' of the 'authors of the Communist Manifesto fifty years ago' the pamphlet declared that 'the Administrative Council of the South African Labour Party as well as the South African Industrial Federation, true to tradition, reiterated their adherence to the same principles .'
The War on War League firmly identified itself with those trends in the International labour movement who had stood firm against the stream of chauvinism. 'In Germany the grand figure of Liebknecht . . . stands at the head of a large and increasing army of anti-war Socialists. In Russia, the Socialist Party, more consistent than all, has throughout opposed the war at the price of wholesale arrest deportation and execution.'
The internationalists, in the face of intensive censorship and persecution by the Botha-Smuts government, persisted courageously with their policy inside and outside the Party. The Creswellites, advocates of the 'see-it-through' policy, by contrast resorted to underhand factional activities and relied on whipping up jingoism.
By July 1915 this intrigue had reached such serious proportions that a public rebuke 'The Labour Party's Duty in the War - A Reply to the "See-it-Through " Policy ' was issued by twenty leading members of the Party, headed by the Chairman, Bill Andrews, the Secretary, David Ivon Jones, S. P. Bunting, Colin Wade and others, including six members of the Transvaal Provincial Council. There was no denying, they wrote, that 'serious differences' existed in the Party about the war. Cresswell spoke about his 'duty to his country.' His real loyalty was not to South Africa but to the Empire. But 'the Labour or democratic principle and the imperialist principle cannot subsist in the one policy.' 'Socialism must imply real self-government for South Africa.'
It is the Labour Party's duty to the country not at all hazards to win the next elections, but to stand firm . . . to the principle of peace and International goodwill and to the identity of interest of the International working class.
The appeal was in vain. The 'see-it-through imperialist faction succeeded in August forcing a special conference, packed by the Creswellites, at which they carried a pro-war resolution.
The Right Wing followed up this victory by demanding that all candidates for the coming elections pledge their support for the war. In protest eight executive members headed by the Chairman (Andre the Secretary ~ones) and the treasurer (Weinstock) resigned from their positions. A new body of internationalists, incorporating the War on War League, was formed, and started its own weekly - The International. Within a few weeks it became clear that the Labour Party would not tolerate a revolutionary wing within its ranks.
In September 1915 they therefore quit the Labour Party and established a new organisation: the International Socialist League of South Africa. In this they were joined by the De Leonite Socialist Labour Party which had stood aloof from the Labour Party and whose ideas were of considerable importance, positive and negative, in moulding the ideology of the ISL
'Here we plant the flag of the New International in South Africa.' These were the challenging words with which David Ivon Jones began his editorial in the very first issue of The International. For he and his comrades did not believe that the desertion of the leaders of the European socialist movement meant the end of that movement; they believed that out of that experience a new and greater movement would arise on sound, revolutionary foundations the 'New International.' It was the very thought which Lenin had expressed in November 1914 when, unknown to the South Africans, whose knowledge of overseas developments was obscured by heavy censorship, he had written:
'The Second International is dead, overcome by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the Third International!'
'What the labour movement requires is a return to the limpid, unequivocal affirmations of the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx.' wrote The International ('Back to the Manifesto' 10 December 1915.)
It was precisely these two main characteristics of the ISL: its devoted internationalism; and its determination to break with the opportunism of the Labour Party and return to the 'limpid, unequivocal affirmations' of Marxism which were its chief strengths. These were the qualities which enabled it to survive and develop, to overcome all its inner difficulties and external hostility, to provide the main foundation upon which the Communist Party was built in 1921.
For the ISL the break with the Labour Party meant a searching review of the opportunist errors which had led to its corruption: the assumption that it was the Party's duty 'at all hazards to win the next election' and above all, that the white workers alone were or could be the vanguard of socialism in South Africa. Already in October 1915 Jones had written: 'An internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the Native working class is capable of claiming will be a sham. Not until we free the Natives can we hope to free the Whites.' He returned to the theme in The International in December 1915:
Slaves to a higher oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves batten on a lower slave class, the native races. Thus has the South African labour movement grown more intolerant to the native slaves than any other working class in the world, and consequently more parasitical than any other. To such a movement, talk of the International unity of the working class could never arouse sincere response.
The first Congress of the ISL, in January 1916, adopted a 'petition of rights' moved by S. P. Bunting, who was to prove a tireless advocate of African rights. This document demanded the abolition of pass laws and indentured and compound labour, and equal rights, political and industrial, for African workers.
The League began to turn an ever-increasing proportion of its attention and activities towards socialist propaganda among the African and other non-white workers. In the election of 1916 for the Transvaal Provincial Council the League candidate, W. H. Andrews declared that it was the 'imperative duty of the white workers to recognise their identity of interest with the native worker as against their common masters . . . It is time for the white workers to deal with the native as a man and a fellow worker and not as a chattel slave or serf. Only that way lies freedom and justice for all.'
In contrast with the indifference shown by the Labour Party in 1913 towards the Native Land Act, the League campaigned in protest against Native Administration Bill of 1917, designed to complete the process of African proletarianisation. A meeting held in Johannesburg in March that year was an historic occasion, for ANC leaders S. Msane and A. Mbelle had accepted the League's invitation to share its platform: an extraordinary event for the times.
The upheavals in Russia in 1917 made a powerful impact upon the workers and oppressed people of South Africa. The significance of Russia had never been lost upon the South African radicals, some of whom indeed were refugees from Tsarism.
The International, and particularly Ivon Jones its editor, responded to the Russian events with enthusiasm and a perception remarkable in one so far from the scene of action. As early as February 1917 when progressives the world over were exulting at the downfall of Tsarism, Jones wrote:
This is a bourgeois revolution, but arriving when the night of capitalism is far spent it cannot be a repetition of previous revolutions. Now two classes pursue their several ways: one 'to prosecute the war abroad' and 'law and order' at home; the other to pursue the class war at home and the Socialist Republic in all countries.
'170 Million Recruits' The International,
March 23,1917.
From then on The International returned with mounting emphasis to the Russian events. 'Exactly what the ISL would have done . . . that is what the Russian workmen have done.' (April) 'Russian Workmen Vindicate Marx' (Editorial, May) ' Full Support to the Russian Proletariat' (June).
From July 1917 onwards The International began to receive and pass on to its readers information from actual Bolshevik sources. The July, 1917, issue reproduced almost in full an article from Pravda (described as 'Lenin's Organ') and passages from Pravda appeared in nearly every issue thereafter, as well as from Izvestia. 'Lenin on the Top' was the heading of an editorial (August 31) declaring: 'The situation is developing in favour of the principles advocated by Lenin. Every week proves him right.'
The Great October Revolution was a triumphant vindication for Ivon Jones and his comrades. In November 1917 he wrote, under the above title:
What we are witnessing is an unfolding of the world-wide Commonwealth of Labour, which if the oppressed of all lands only knew . . . would sweep them into transports of gladness. It is this high ecstasy which animates the Russian people today . . . Our task in South Africa is a great one. We must educate the people in the principles of the Russian Revolution. We have to prepare the workers against any attempt to mobilise them against their Russian comrades, and in preparing, spread the flames of the most glorious and most peaceful revolution of all time.
'We are South African Bolsheviks' declared the ISL A pamphlet The Bolsheviks are Coming, written by Jones and L. H. Green was published in English, Zulu and Sesotho in 1918, addressed 'to the workers of South Africa Black as well as White.'
For distributing this leaflet in Martizburg Jones and Green were prosecuted for 'inciting to public violence,' and found guilty, the magistrate commenting that the leaflet was 'libellous, treasonable and indeed diabolical.'
In Durban an Indian Workers' Industrial Union, was established and sent a delegate to the annual conference of the ISL in January 1918. Backed by the African National Congress, the ISL founded the Industrial Workers of Africa, a general union of African workers, later to become absorbed by the ICU (Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union) which flourished mightily in the twenties and counted its membership in tens of thousands.
In 1919 over 70,000 African miners on the Witwatersrand came out on strike. The ISL, issued a leaflet to the white workers: 'Don't Scab! '
White Workers! Do you hear the new Army of Labour coming? The native workers are beginning to wake up. They are finding out that they are slaves to the big capitalists.
But they want to rise. Why not? They want better housing and better clothes, better education and a higher standard of life.
White workers! On which side are you? Your interests and theirs are the same as against the Boss.
Back them up! The Chamber of Mines will be a king you to take up the rifle to dragoon the Native strikers. Don't do it!
Leaflets were distributed to African miners and other workers in Zulu, Sesotho and other languages. Among them were a simple series of 'lessons' for those new to Marxism 'Lesson 1' began
In the days gone by the Bantu people lived alone upon the land of Africa. The land belonged to them and they brought forth the fruits of the kindly earth for their common good. And in those days the only Masters were the Kings of the Bantu people Then came the white masters of the world and took away the land from the Bantu people so that they served the white masters and toiled for low wages. This is now come to pass more than two hundred years since the white masters of the world came to South Africa and prepared to make slave of the Bantu people.'
Others in the series went on to explain the ideas of working-class internationalism and workers' organisation, and the significance of the Russian Revolution.
The Comintern
The International Socialist League enthusiastically welcomed the establishment of the Third International (the Comintern) It was among the first Parties to apply for affiliation and was represented at the third world Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow in 1920, by two delegates: D. l Jones(2) and Sam Barlin.
Others in South Africa had also been drawn Leftwards by the magnetic attraction of the October Revolution. In Cape Town, a group of revolutionaries headed by Manuel Lopez, A Z Berman and J. Pick, broke away from the Social-Democratic Federation and established the Industrial Socialist League Although influenced by ultra-left syndicalist ideas, it identified itself with the Russian revolution and entitled its monthly journal The Bolshevik. A like-minded group in the Transvaal broke away from the International Socialist League when their motion for a total boycott of Parliamentary elections was rejected at the fifth national conference of that body at the beginning of 1920 In October that year these two groups announced that they had merged into the 'Communist Party of South Africa' though their ultra-left stance, which isolated them from most South African Communists, made their usurpation of the title presumptuous.
This application, like those of other minority socialist groups, was unacceptable. The fifth annual conference of the International Socialist League had unanimously decided on January 4, 1920, to formally apply for affiliation: its letter to this effect having been read out, with applause, at the Second Congress of the Comintern on July 24, 1920.
Like several other groups and circles, such as the Jewish Socialist Society and the Indian workers' union of Natal, they were anxious to affiliate to the Communist International. However, among the rules adopted at the Third International Congress (the 'Twenty-One Conditions' formulated by Lenin) there was one which precluded the affiliation of more than on Party from any country.
Accordingly, the International Socialist League took the initiative of bringing together all the socialist parties, groups and individuals with the object of establishing a single, disciplined and centralised Communist Party.
One hundred delegates from nearly all the socialist organisations - excluding the Labour Party, though some of its individual members took part - met in Johannesburg on January 2, 1921, and nearly all agreed on the 'Twenty-One Conditions'.
Foundation of the Communist Party
By March 1921 a sufficient measure of agreement had been reached to enable the election of a joint Unity Committee to draft a Manifesto and Constitution and prepare for the Founding Conference of the Communist Party.
This took place in Cape Town, from 30 July to 1 August 1921. It was preceded by a public meeting, attended by over two thousand, mainly Coloured workers, addressed by Bill Andrews, who announced the establishment, aims and character of the new Party.
The Conference formally established the Communist Party of South Africa (South African Section of the Communist International), and adopted its constitution and manifesto. It also elected an executive, with its headquarters in Johannesburg. W. H. Andrews was elected secretary-editor, C. B. Tyler chairman and S. P. Bunting, Treasurer.(3)
The organ of the new Party was to be The International, and it took over the ISL's press and offices.
The Manifesto pledged the newly-born Party to struggle despite 'any sacrifices it may be called upon to undergo, to hasten the time.
when mankind shall no longer cower under the bludgeon of the oppressor, when the necessaries and amenities of life, the comfort and the culture, the honour and the power, shall be to him who toils, not him who exploits; when none shall be called master and none servant, but all shall be fellow-workers in common.
From the lSL to the Communist Party
At its outset, in its membership, leadership and outlook, the young Communist Party bore the powerful impress of its main constituent body, the International Socialist League. Some commentators have concluded that the Party was 'virtually a continuation of the League'; indeed as late as 1929 the national conference of the Party referred to its 'origins in 1915.'
Yet the foundation of the Communist Party in 1921 marked something far more profound than a mere change of name. It marked a decisive turning-point in the evolution of the Party, its character, aims and outlook.
The International Socialist League was far from being an ideologically homogeneous and united organisation. Its leaders and founders (among them, particularly in the person of W. H. Andrews, the very founders and leaders of the labour movement of the organised i.e., at that time, the white working class) had broken with the right wing of the Labour Party to maintain the principle of proletarian internationalism.
So doing they broke at the same time with white chauvinism and the opportunism which led the Labour Party to consider the 'native question' mainly from the point of view of what would be acceptable to the white electorate.
Liberated from the stultifying atmosphere of the Labour Party the lSL began boldly to rethink its attitude towards the African people, and the African workers in particular. It courageously attacked racialism in principle; it drew up a 'Charter of African Rights' which, with all its imperfections, was a tremendous advance on the segregationism of the Labour Party and indeed of any 'liberal' programme of the time; it established relations with the ANC and invited its speakers to share the League's platform; it began an energetic drive for the industrial organisation of the black workers.
Despite all these substantial and historic achievements the lSL was never able either to evolve a consistently Marxist and revolutionary attitude towards the national struggle of the African people for land and freedom, nor to overcome entirely the traces of its origin within the white labour movement. Considering the inevitable limitations imposed on the pioneers of the ISL by its own history, the remarkable thing is not these relative failures but that it progressed as far as it did. Many currents: pacifist, anarchist, syndicalist and others - were present at its inception and throughout its existence. It is true that a revolutionary Marxist tendency was also present and came to be the dominant force, but even then it was for the most part a partial and distorted concept of Marxism that reached our country.
When the International Socialist League broke away from the Labour Party it was joined by the Socialist Labour Party, which had long been devotedly advocating the version of Marxism propagated by organisations of the same name in Britain and the United States, and expounded in the writings of David De Leon. These ideas were the predominant influence in the ISL, filling the ideological vacuum which had hitherto existed.
De Leon, who died in 1914, was a tireless and brilliant propagandist and populariser of what he understood to be Marxism. He mercilessly denounced the right-wing leaders of the labour movement and the craft unions Lenin quoted approvingly his lethal description of them as 'Labour Lieutenants of the capitalist class.' His ideas exerted a powerful revolutionary influence in most English-speaking countries, inspiring the formation of the militant 'Industrial Workers of the World' (the 'Wobblies') whose remarkable rise left an enduring mark on American labour history, and at one stage winning adherents of the calibre of Tom Mann and Willie Gallacher in Britain, James Connolly in Ireland, and 'Big Bill' Heywood in the United States.
Yet his was a distorted version of Marxism. Dogmatic and sectarian in tendency, 'De Leonism' found its expression in the denunciation of all types of parliamentary political activity and an appeal to boycott craft and trade unions. The formation of 'one big Industrial Union' and the subsequent calling of a general strike was the panacea for the winning of workers' power and the overthrow of capitalism.
William Z. Foster, veteran leader of the Communist Party of the United States, commented that 'few men have made a greater impression on the American labour movement than Daniel De Leon, able and eloquent speaker, clever reasoner and dominant personality. But despite his brilliance he was essentially a sophist and a utopian.' And in his History of the Communist Party of Great Britain (p. 18) James Klugmann writes: 'De Leonism was the essential outlook of the Socialist Labour Party (a predecessor of the CPGB) right up to World War 1. The British Socialist Party remained in the grip of De Leonism right up to the war when under the influence of Tom Bell and Arthur MacManus it began to broaden its political outlook.'
The extent of this theoretical current were revealed in the report presented by Jones, on behalf of the ISL, to the Comintern in 1921.(4) Describing the foundation of the League, he wrote:
'The anti-war section (of the Labour Party) broke away and with the co-operation of what were called the SLP men (Comrades like John Campbell and Rabb) who propagated the principles of Marxism as propagated by De Leon, formed the International Socialist League.'.
Jones, indeed, wrote of the lSL as 'having been captured by the De Leonites'. In the same report he explained the influence of these ideas on the turning of lSL activities towards organising the African workers:
Imbued with the ideas of De Leon as popularised in the splendid series of Marxian pamphlets issued by the SLP of America and Great Britain, the League proclaimed the principle of Industrial Unionism . . . Craft unions were declared odious as dividing the workers instead of uniting them on the larger basis of industry. And as part of this craft disunity the exclusion of the native workers from part or lot in the Labour Movement was denounced as a crime . . .
At the same time Jones showed that already by 1921 the ISL was realising the limitations of De Leonism. He continued:
'To us, the rather mechanical formula of De Leon's lndustrial Unionism (which was deemed capable of performing a bloodless revolution by a "lockout of the capitalist class") was made a living thing by its application to the native workers.'
Nevertheless, similar syndicalist concepts remained within the Communist Party for many years after its foundation; echoes of their approach and phraseology appear in many documents and journals. Jones's participation in the Communist International and his study of Lenin's writings was a revelation to him of the breadth and flexibility of truly revolutionary Marxist approaches and tactics, far-removed from the arid sectarianism of the Socialist Labour Parties, which regarded every movement for partial reforms as treachery and every struggle other than a 'pure working class' one as a useless diversion. In his last letter written to W. H. Andrews from Yalta (13 April 1924) he wrote approvingly of the South African Young Communist League's campaign to improve conditions for apprentices:
What a long chalk this is from the old SALP hatred of all 'reform' . . . we are learning how to combine the struggle for reform with the revolutionary struggle, or rather how to make the struggle for reforms revolutionary. I have just been reading one of Lenin's early brochures of 1902, where he declares that the political struggle of the working class is not exclusively a struggle for the economic betterment of the workers, but also a struggle in which the party of the workers enters in defence of every oppressed section, even non-worker sections, of society. For example he cited the call to the workers to demonstrate against the Czar drafting . . . students into the army. A positive attitude on every issue!
A deathblow to De Leonite survivals and all other dogmatic and sectarian distortions in the Communist movement in South Africa and throughout the world was struck by the publication in 1920 of Lenin's pamphlet '"Left-Wing" Communism an Infantile Disorder'. This peerless exposition of revolutionary flexibility in tactics, combined with the utmost firmness of principle, cut the ground beneath the feet of all romantic exponents of 'ultra-revolutionariness' though no doubt, as the author foresaw, such tendencies will always rise again within each revolutionary movement.
The National Question
Thus the formation of the Communist Party as a section of the Communist International marked a qualitative change, the beginning of a radical transformation in every aspect of the Party's ideology, character and organisation.
In no sphere was the impact of the international communist movement, and especially of Lenin's contribution to it, more dynamic and far reaching than in its effect on the Party's understanding of the national and colonial question, and its application to our country.
Undoubtedly Lenin's thinking opened up an entire new dimension of Marxist theory on this issue in the age of modern imperialism monopoly capitalism. Within Tsarist Russia, that 'prison-house of nations', Lenin had ever been the most ardent fighter against national discrimination, and against those within the labour movement who condoned it, even when they hid behind leftist' and 'internationalist' phrases.
'Whoever does not recognise and champion the equality of nations and languages, and does not fight against all national oppression or inequality, is not a Marxist; he is not even a democrat' he wrote scathingly (Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 28). In the tradition of Marx and Engels, especially in their writings on Irish independence, he and the Bolshevik Party which he led proclaimed the right of all oppressed nations to self-determination' i.e., the right to secede and form independent states.'
During the first world war Lenin completed his detailed analysis of modern imperialism (Imperialism - the Highest Stage of Capitalism.)(5)
Defining modern imperialism as the period of the merging of finance and industrial capital into vast national and supra-national monopolies Lenin showed how this era brought forth the most extreme contradiction between social production and private appropriation. The whole world was carved up into empires by a handful of imperialist super-powers, who then vied with one another to redivide it on terms more favourable to themselves.
From this penetrating analysis, Lenin drew far-reaching conclusions. While imperialism, greatly exacerbated the contradictions within, and between the imperialist countries, it had at the same time spread racialist ideas and won over to the support of colonialism an influential upper section of the workers, allowing them a share of the super-profits extracted from cheap labour and resources in the colonies. Hence the opportunism which had destroyed the Second International.
At the same time, colonialist disruption of the traditional way of life and economies of the colonial peoples had brought into being an immensely important new factor in the world revolutionary movement: the national liberation movements in the colonies. Contesting the conventional view prevalent in the Second International that this movement was of small or secondary importance, Lenin wrote:
But this is not so. It (the national liberation movement) has undergone great change since the beginning of the twentieth century. Millions and hundreds of millions, in fact the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe, are now coming forward as independent, active and revolutionary factors. It is perfectly clear that in the impending decisive battles in the world revolution, the movement of the population of the globe, initially directed towards national liberation, will turn against capitalism and imperialism and will perhaps play a much more revolutionary part than we expect.
(Collected Works, Vol.32, pp. 481-482).
Lenin's remarkable foresight established the theoretical basis for the alliance of the revolutionary working class and national liberation movements on a world scale, so notable a feature of our times. But his ideas were put forward at a time when the imperialist powers still held firm and apparently stable domination over practically the whole of Asia and Africa, and it was many years before they were fully understood or developed in South Africa, or even for that matter in the Communist International itself.
Certainly, that these ideas had begun to penetrate and be discussed by the International Socialist League even before the formation of the Communist Party is evidenced by a striking passage in Jones's 1921 report to the Comintern, following a brief description of the African National Congress: 'Here is a revolutionary movement in the fullest meaning of Lenin's term.'
True the entire passage is disappointingly short (less than a single page out of twenty) and disparaging. Congress is described as a 'small coterie of educated natives', 'satisfied with agitation for civil equality and political rights', with no inkling of the enormous revolutionary significance of these rights in a country such as South Africa. The ANC is contrasted unfavourably with the Industrial Workers' of Africa, and the report predicts that 'the growing class organisations of the natives will soon dominate or displace the Congress.'
Yet considering the times and conditions, the truly significant factor was not that the ISL and the pioneers of the Communist movement in South Africa made errors of analysis and emphasis, arising out of the limitations of their origin and outlook. It was the extent to which with the fraternal assistance of the world Communist movement and the inspiration of Lenin's ideas, the Party was able to transcend these
limitations to become the advanced spearhead of the South African working class as a whole; the pace-setter in the building of the united front of liberation, centred in the African National Congress; the front-rank detachment of the national democratic revolution.
In this process of transformation, the establishment on July 30 1921
of the united Party of South African Communists, as a section of the Communist
International, was a nodal and essential turning point.
Notes:
1. The resolution, passed unanimously by the International Socialist Congress at Basle, Switzerland, in 1912, foresaw the type of war which broke out in 1914, declared that was reactionary, was being prepared in the interest of 'capitalist profits', declared that the workers consider it 'a crime to shoot each other down' and that the war would lead to a proletarian revolution.
2. David Ivon Jones did not return to South Africa he remained in Moscow where he participated with Lenin and others in the structure of the Communist International. The ill-health which had pursued him for most of his life overtook him and he died at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Yalta in 1924 Hence he did not personally take part in the formation of the Communist Party, though he remained in regular correspondence with Bunting, Andrews and others until his death.
3. The other members were G. Arnold, Rebecca Bunting, T. Chapman, J. den Bakker, R Geldblum, H. Lee, E. M. Pincus and R Rabb.
4. Communism in South Africa by David Ivon Jones. Presented to the Executive of the Third International on behalf of the International Socialist League of South Africa Johannesburg, 1921
5. It is interesting here to note that he made use of and acknowledged the work of the British economist J. A. Hobson author of Imperialism - A Study (London 1902), based largely on studies he had made for his earlier work, The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects (London, 1900).