Apartheid (and slavery)

Just found this in the library, didn't know we had it! http://libcom.org/community-struggles-in-south-africa-1994-2004

Read Aptheker, sorry. Although all of the insurrections were suppressed (until the general strike that happened when the South seceded, which Du Bois documents in Black Reconstruction) plantation society had to increasingly structure itself around and against the threat of insurrection, ideologically, militarily, and economically.

Haiti was widely discussed by both slaves and slaveowners for the entire 60-70 year period following it.

Can't write much at the moment, the war between the States was very very overdetermined, I agree with your last paragraph. When you say "serfdom was intensified in central Europe as market relations developed," this is part of what dependency theorists & worldsystems folks call "underdevelopment". It's not simply a willful absence of development, it's a different trajectory codependent on the development in the core. I also believe that something structurally similar to this development/underdevelopment dialectic happens "in the core" geographically speaking at least, i.e. there are manifestations not only of "extensive" underdevelopment but "intensive" underdevelopment. (Not talking about "internal colonies" though.) OK gotta run

Flint I refer you to, for starters, several long posts of mine on all the "national liberation" threads this year, which are still awaiting a response. MJ said he was in the process of responding, perhaps you should consult with him on that and start a new thread. You certainly seem to be confused as to who you are discussing this with and what their general position is, perhaps symptomatic of the trend whereby NEFAC posters seem to think "libcom" is some kinda collective entity where everybody thinks the same thing apart from them and a couple of their buddies.

I refer you to my response to your posting of a ZACF statement here:
http://libcom.org/forums/thought/apoc-vs-white-people?page=2

Yeah Flint Terry's got a pretty decent outlook on these things, and I do owe him a thread already.

Not only that, in most Southern locales able bodied whites who could not pay for a replacement, were required to take time about riding the midnight slave patrols. The region lived in stark terror of slave revolt, it would be hard to overstate that point. At one point slave importation was halted, not from humanitarian concerns, but to slow the rate at which blacks were coming to outnumber whites in the Black Belt (a swath of land across the lower southeastern US.) Even though Haitian style revolt never came to the US, and Nat Turner was put down, there were enough master-poisenings and property destructions that everytime something bad happened-- a sickness leading to death, or a tragic fire-- the masters had to wonder at the cause. I'm sure their own guilt and paranoia fed their fear.

Du Bois' book is great, as is Aptheker's. Both bring to light the role that blacks played in their own liberation. At present I am reading Allen's Reconstruction, The Battle for Democracy. I have to say, I find his thesis of the Civil War and Reconstruction being among the last of the bougie revs, more convincing than Du Bois' take on Reconstruction as a dictatorship of the proles.

Next time y'all start talking about the Civil War, somebody better fucking e-mail me...

I just figured my typing "the war between the States" on Libcom would send some kind of bat signal over the Kentucky skies!

Some years ago I penned a pamplet on "the war between the States" (which did not become a "civil war" until the Union Leagues and the Klan squared off after the war proper, imho.) It wasn't a heavy analysis a la Du Bois (I know you're shocked.) More a populist agit prop aimed at rural southerners, with the thesis that the war was just one more power struggle between bosses fought by workers (that the slaves played well), rather than a crusade by the US gov't to end slavery. Might sound esoteric, to someone outside the region. But trust me, defeating Confederate mythology among white workers is a much needed task down south, in the here and now.

I enjoyed that so much, I treated WWII next. A third section illustrating that the US antiwar movement was not born during the 1960's, but rather during the American War for Independence and has been a feature of most every conflcit since, and voila, a book was born.

Having all but given up on getting it published, I'll think I'll dust off the rural southern agit-prop pamplett idea for the first third. I think nefac should fund the effort, as an outreach project. Hey, we're dirt pore down here.

edit: probably not clear how debunking the myth of northerners saving blacks, helps to defeat Confedearte mythology. The latter myths are largely sacred, as a defense measure against the inferiority that the former myths instill. Make sense?

MJ asked

Yes, from the mid-70s to the end of Apartheid those badass left communists intervened with leaflets, articles, at demonstrations and at meetings, against the anti-apartheid movement. They (essentially the ICC, and the Communist Workers Organisation, CWO) argued that the ‘anti-apartheid movement’ was attempting to enclose, limit and derail the South African workers’ strikes and demonstrations against the degradation of all its conditions of life into a campaign for a ‘more humane’ form of capitalist exploitation.

Towards the end of the Eighties, these organisations further argued that the aims of the ‘anti-apartheid movement’ coincided with the (belated) strategies of US and British imperialism to defend their interests in the region by replacing the overtly racist rule of capital with a more ‘democratic’ form. In this sense, the coming to power of the ANC – preceded by the creation of ‘democratic’ unions like Cyril Ramaphosa’s NUM - was indeed a ‘victory’ for capital as Baboon says, a (temporary) stabilisation on many levels (class struggle, inter-imperialist alliances) to permit the continued extraction of surplus value.

Furthermore, as both the ICC and CWO said at the time, the condition of the proletariat was not to improve under the new regime which, as Terry points out, had the effect, for a while, of paralysing the class struggle.

Writing about the massive strike wave of workers in Bangladesh last year, the CWO (today part of the IBRP) wrote:

‘The situation can be compared to that in South Africa in the 1970’s, where the setting up of unions was presented as a great victory for the working class, even though the leading sectors of the capitalist class supported this. These were, of course, the same sectors who understood the need to bring the African Nationalists to power and to move to an organisation of production based solely on class and not in any way based on race. The unions proved key allies in bringing this about and are now in alliance with the bourgeois ANC government which is supervising capitalist exploitation of their members so efficiently that the economy is experiencing a massive boom. The condition of the South African working class as a whole has not improved and unemployment remains at 26%.’

A brief look at Libcom’s news pages concerning the ‘official’ attempt to end the current strikes in South Africa confirms this.

We sell the Aptheker book and you can get it in connolly books, next time you are in Dublin Terry. It might also be in ther CAZ, if you are still in Cork, its not that difficult to get.

Out of curiosity, would you categorize the chattel-slaves under the Southern plantation system proletarians?

In the strictest sense I suppose not, as they were neither urban nor industrial. However, chattel slaves did labor for the market in great, coordinated masses of humanity, which is typical of proletarians. Furthermore, while their labors were decidedly agricultural, they did not labor for subsistence (as was typical of the peasantry); rather, the demand for cotton was occasioned by technological advances in textile manufacturing. So in an abstract, second hand sense, the slaves might have been termed proles. (In fact, in my pamphlet I dub the plantations the original factory farms.)

On the other hand, antebellum society itself more resembled a feudal society, than otherwise. Plantation masters-- unlike the industrial bourgeoisie-- took a hands off approach to managing, fighting cocks and racing horses where the aristocracy once jousted. And only someone who has never lived in the Deep South could fail to see the parallels between the Catholic superstition that undergirded feudalism, and the white supremacist Christian (largely Baptist) theology that threaded (and continues to thread) through Southern communities.

Chattel slavery simply was what it was, agricultural labor performed by the owned (typical of antiquity), performed on a mass scale to meet market demands (typical of the modern era and its "capitalist mode of production"), set in a society that clung to a certain extent, to feudal mores. Trying to force it into a category beyond that, I think, is not helpful.

When I say I prefer Allen's take on the war and its aftermath as a late period bourgeois revolution, I mean more in the sense that it settled the question of who would dominate, the owners of the factories or the producers of raw materials. And industrial interests vs. agricultural was typical of bourgeoisie revolutions. Even if one concedes that chattel slaves were in a sense proles (as I do), this doesn't prove the Reconstruction government(s) to have been dictatorships of the proletariats in the Leninist sense that Du Bois intends, rather than simply new bourgeoisie governments with a different class (or coalition of interests) in command (however briefly).

Leaving the bosses aside, to focus on the workers: more important than the question "were slaves proles?"-- more important, at least, to a populist hick such as myself-- is the question: were slaves member's of the working class, were they in fact society's most oppressed and deserving of support in that degree and on that basis? Absolutely. As Fred Douglas said, "When a factory worker quits his job, they don't set the hounds on him." The program of communist militants should be that of society's most oppressed.

On that note: does nefac have a position regarding amnesty for illegal Latino immigrants in the US today? You know, those Mexicans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans who are oppressed not only as workers, but also on the basis of their-- you guessed it!-- nationality. Come on, all you leftist tailgating cheerleaders out there, what about it?

Don't see why the fact they were non-urban and engaged in agricultural production would make them non-proletarian? Particularly the non-urban part - wouldn't that exclude English mining communities for instance? Not being wage earners would be the key issue...but I'm not saying that should matter to our consideration.

Also don't think it is who in a society is the most oppressed that matters, it is who has the potential agency, or capacity, to create communism. Rich women in Saudi Arabia are undoubtedly oppressed for instance, I can't see them being in the van of socialism though. Not to mention the fact that making communism will probably require a dash or two of 'oppression'.

Also the 'national oppression' of migrant workers to the United States, is surely geared towards making them more exploitable and precarious, it is totally a class issue.
It, and the situation of minorities in the United States generally, is not, unless I have completely missed something, at all analogous to 'oppressed nations' overthrowing the imperial yoke, such as Ireland circa 1916 to 1923.

While I'm being contrary gotta say I find the whole concept of 'bourgeois revolutions', in the classical sense, to be a bit dubious.

well

that's from here btw.

I would be shocked if anyone currently in NEFAC weren't for full "amnesty" -- as a transitional demand, of course.

I've got a complete photocopy of the book "We Are the Poors" from which a lot of the info for that text is taken and it's pretty damn good. Anyway if someone promised to scan the book for putting up on LibCom I'd mail it to you. I was going to do it myself 4 or 5 years ago and the author said he didn't mind if it went online but then I got a job.

On the main topic of this thread a couple of articles that might be worth reading are this one from the ICG:

http://www.geocities.com/icgcikg/english/communism3.htm#south_africa

And at Endangered Phoenix, http://www.endangeredphoenix.com/ click on the Class Struggle histories tab or the same article with a different intro is at:

http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/archive/global/southafrica.html

What I was trying to say, was whether or not a given strata of workers is proletarian or not depends on the operative definition, a matter of perhaps some interest, but not necessarily (imo) of much importance. I am pretty sure I've heard some folks (not me necessarily) define proles narrowly as the industrial urban workers alone. (MJ's references I think indicate where one goes with such parsing-- slaves become something other than working class, for crying out loud!) But I tend to use a workers vs. bosses framework anyway. Keep it simple, train your sights on the suits. Chattel slaves weren't bosses, they weren't poised in the middle like petty b shopkeepers, they were the very bottom layer of labor. Obviously.

Rich women in Saudi Arabia may be oppressed, but I would hardly consider them the most oppressed strata of the workers (which is what I intended to communicate initially, with the reference to "the most oppressed".) One lesson of the bourgeois revolutions is that a lower class can overthrow the ruling class-- as was the case with the bourgeoisie overthrowing the aristocracy in numerous cases-- and whereas the workers did benefit, nothing resembling a horizontal society was achieved. Hence, my argument that we should avoid an over-identification with, for example, "the aristocracy of labor", skilled unionized tradesman. Certainly they should be supported in their struggles with the bosses, but hardly to the neglect of lower strata of the working class. We aim to unite the workers, and therein lies "the agency to create communism" (sez here).

Speaking of the lower strata, if the precarity of Latino "illegals" were "totally" a matter of class, I don't think so many would be scrambling for, fabricating, and finally demanding US citizenship. Certainly creating a workforce that is more "exploitable and precarious" than the existing workforce is a motivation for the bosses, perhaps the primary one. But allowing city governments like Dalton in states like Georgia to maintain their largely white makeup, amidst a sea of brown faces and Latino surnames, is also a factor. None of this, I think, is solely about class, or totally separate from class. Class is paramount, but not to the exclusion of all else. Society is complex.

Randy - replied to your Amnesty thing here: http://libcom.org/forums/libcommunity/nefac?page=17#comment-206085

I don't know if any admins have scanning/OCR time. We are considering buying a "libcom scanner" which we can lend to anyone with loads of time who wants to scan pamphlets, or something. I think I'll start a scanning thread.

Thanks - this has been a really interesting thread, if only in part about apartheid.

This is also interesting, about the 76-77 school students' revolt that spread across SA - in the library;
http://libcom.org/library/reflections-on-the-black-consciousness-movement-and-the-south-african-revolution

Been good for me to revisit all this, several years since having read WEB's Black Reconstruction. My quarrel with his thesis of Reconstruction as a dictatorship of the proles, has less to do with his depiction of chattel slaves as proles, as with the Leninist idea that a dictatorship of the proles was the thing that was needed.

Instead, I contend that the great tragedy of the era was less the premature end of the Reconstruction regime, than the failure of the union's memberships (largely in the North, and who were experiencing quite a boom during and after the war) to rally to the cause of black labor. Twenty years later all labor, black and white, north and south, was on the defensive once again. There may not be a more powerful illustration anywhere (certainly none more gripping to me) of the problem of activist subculture and working class politics being separate. If the abolition movement had been taking place within the worker's organizations, instead of in middle class churches-- hell, what a different world we might live in today! Apparently its social insertion or bust, for our libertarian prospects.

Not much discussion about South Africa. Interesting discussion in that it is mainly about slavery and not apartheid in South Africa. Is it because the workers in South Africa are mainly black that slavery dominates this discussion? Are black workers slaves in the sense of slavery as a mode of production? How do you equate workers in South Africa today with slavery - is it because they are black? Interesting.
But on to the topic...
As long as capitalism wanted apartheid, apartheid existed and was upheld by the major capitalist states. When apartheid was no longer useful to them, not least due to its inability to contain the class struggle, the major imperialisms got rid of it and installed an equally heinous regime. Even Pik Botha joined the ANC after the "revolution". Of course apartheid is a brutal regime, but as a creature of capitalism at a particular time and place (just like fascism) it fulfilled a role for the ruling class. Apartheid hasn't gone away but just been adapted to new, particular circumstance for the ruling class, embellished with trade unions and other such democratic paraphenalia against the working class. The US got rid of apartheid, not to improve the conditions of the workers and masses in South Africa, but 1) to create institutions capable of controlling the class struggle (the South African proletariat is the most important on the continent and was becoming very menacing for capital) and 2) to strike a blow against British imperialism in the region.

Nah, somebody drew an analogy and the discussion got sidetracked, sorry.

The ANC's "Freedom Charter": "... our country belongs to everyone and all our people shall share in its wealth. The land will be shared among those who woek it. There shall be houses, security and the right to work...."
Chavez has taken a leaf out of the ANC's book. Land reform means taking a tiny percentage of land (about 4% in S. Africa) dump some confused peasants on it from the slums. Give them no back up, no equipment, no advice, not even deeds to the land which are some time in the distant future. In short put a massive millstone around their necks and, hey presto, land reform.
Walls have been built in S.Africa, along the roads from the airport so the shanty towns are not seen. 5.3 million children live in abject povery (United Nations Development Programme) and AIDs is rife (though denied by Thabo "just call me a Thatcherite" Mbeki) and all indicators of poverty and unemployment have shown significant increases since 1995 (UNDP).
The great advances of the ANC includes a guaranteed child allowance of 180 rand a month to poor children under 14 (a pittance), but to get it the parents need a birth certificate the cost and the aggravation of which is well beyond most rural parents. The stalinist gangster Mandela promised the blacks the "realisation of their dreams" but couldn't even match the living conditions of the last years of apartheid.
According to a 2005 study presented to the S. African government, duing the last years of apartheid 737,000 people were evicted from white-owned farms. In the first decade of democracy the figure was 942,000, half children and a third women (Hall, Latiff, Cousins, University of Wester Cape, Land and Agrarian studies). It is now apparantly easier to evict poor blacks from white farms than it was under apartheid. The same goes for smashing up shanty towns as practiced by that other great leftist lauded liberator of the blacks, Robert Mugabe. While average white incomes have risen 15% (not of the white working class), black income has fallen 19% (Statistics S. Africa, 2002 - government figures). Ten million blacks have had their water and electricity cut off being unable to pay the soaring cost of both.

ANC black consciousness activist and "comrade" of Steve Biko, Mamplala Ramphele, who was coopted to the World Bank, declared in 1999 that the wage of the poorest public sector workers were too high and they should receive only food for work (Bond, Pluto Press, 2000). Between 1995 and 2000, as the black bourgeoisie move up leaps and bounds, unemployment almost doubled and the majority of South Africans fell into poverty (Statistics South Africa, Labour Force Survey, Sept. 2002).
Nothing much has changed for black workers in South Africa except that their conditions have got worse (as most workers have). More than 5 million went on strike in 2001 and in 2004/5 six thousand protests were recorded. The police acted as brutally as they did under apartheid (Sunday Independent, 10.9.2006). The unions are hand in glove with their ANC class brothers.
In the last 4 years of his imprisonment, Mandela (Uncle Nelson?) was given a private suite, a white chef, a wine cellar, telephones, faxes and a swimming pool. Today he lives on Cecil Rhodes old estate with white security. As president he ordered the bloody invasion of Leosotho, sold arms to Algeria, Peru and Colombia and supported the killer regimes of Suharto and Burma (as well as his unswerving support to Palestinian "freedom fighters"). But Mandela is an old man, a puppet for a regime that is every bit as anti-working class as apartheid. In fact the latter, in slightly "gentler" forms, is inbuilt and strengthened in the present South African regime. Never mind about slavery, which is completely off the subject of workers in South Africa, to support the regime which overthrew apartheid, is to spread popular but dangerous illusions in bourgeois democracy.

Indeed possibly why no one in this discussion is doing so "support (ing) the regime" that is. In any case "the regime" didn't overthrow apartheid, the struggles of the black working class in South Africa did. There then was a move to forms more capable of containing the class struggle, which defused things for a while, but in the last few years we can read of a new wave of struggles in South Africa. In order to successfully argue that the overthrow of apartheid (as opposed to the accession to power of the ANC - note no one is arguing over the ANC government) was something other than a victory, you have to show that there was no change whatsoever, or only change for the worse, from South Africa circa 1987 to South Africa circa 1997, change that is, in terms of the day to day lives of the black working class. I find this improbable, I doubt the struggles could have been contained without at least some reforms, I regard reforms won by popular struggle as victories, even if sometimes they can defuse movements (but not doing that on their own - in a wider ideological context).

Nobody here in this discussion is a supporter of the ANC government so your posts 'exposing' the ANC to us, are, while informative on some issues, a bit pointless.

Incidentally as far as I know there was no land reform in South Africa ala the Freedom Charter so I'm not sure what you are talking about there.

The US administration overthrew apartheid. The conditions of the working class in South Africa, according to the figures I provided, show that these have got worse in a great many respects. The defeat of apartheid in South Africa was not a victory for the working class as you suggest but a victory for the ANC and leftist ideology.

The slavery analogy wasn't because chattel slaves in the US South they were also black workers, it was because they were also proletarians exploited by capital through being assigned a lower tiered legal status than other workers, and because the enforced division between the higher tier of workers and lower tier of workers in that society was the main obstacle to forming a movement of the working class against capital. I'm wondering if you think it was therefore bourgeois manipulation that led chattel slaves to revolt against their conditions and fight for legal freedom, and for some white revolutionist allies to support them in their struggle.

I mean, I can understand the argument -- of course I understand the argument, I'm for communism, and I know that in the long run bourgeois legal freedom has nothing to do with real freedom -- but I'm wondering whether you view the two situations as inherently different, and why, or whether you view them the same and think that the movement to abolish slavery in the US was a bourgeois manipulation.

I'm just trying to draw out your reasoning because I know more about the US South than South Africa (although I am familiar with most of the factoids you're hurling around about neoliberal-era ZA).

(my emphasis).