Robert Fine with Dennis Davis, Beyond Apartheid: Labour and Liberation in South Africa, Pluto Press, 1990, pp338

Hillel Ticktin, The Politics of Race: Discrimination in South Africa, Pluto Press, 1991, pp 115

Bob Edgar (ed), An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J Bunche (28 September 1937-1 January 1938), Ohio University Press, Witwatersrand University Press, 1992, pp398

During the past few years two books have appeared, both written by writers who are sympathetic to the ideas of Leon Trotsky, although differing in their political affiliation. Hillel Ticktin is editor of Critique, but does not belong to any political group. Robert Fine has been for several years an active member of Socialist Organiser.

The books are so different that this review will note the contrast in their approach and appraisal, and this review should be read as a supplement to the material on the history of South African Trotskyism. Ticktin’s work is couched in Marxist language, and he presents his analysis in terms of categories through which he claims to present a critique of the South African political economy. Whatever the merits of the book, this is a remarkably one-dimensional account, in which people appear as shadows, and events are selected to provide a backdrop for the chosen categories. Fine’s work is steeped in the history of people and their working class organisations. However, naming characters without trying to understand what motivated them renders this another one-dimensional work, albeit in a different dimension from that of Ticktin. Fine has looked at the history of the working class in South Africa, and he knows what people did. What he lacks is an understanding of the factors that drove them, and that leads him to judgements that might be formally correct, but show no empathy for persons who had to make snap decisions without the benefit of hindsight.

Starting first with Fine and Davis, I was struck by the approach found in the opening pages. This offered hope of fresh insights into the history of the struggles of the twentieth century. On page x they write:

‘In the history of the liberation movement, nothing could be more erroneous than the image of black people as an undifferentiated mass united by a single political consciousness in their opposition to apartheid. The history of class struggle has been one of debate and dissent, sharp breaks and abrupt turns, competing political organisations and traditions, ad hoc alliances and unpredicted outcomes.’ However, this promise is not sustained. The authors had obviously wandered through existing literature, choosing bits and pieces to provide a background history of trade unionism, mainly African, from 1930 to 1947. Some sections were familiar, having come from documents, supplied or mentioned, during a joint course which I presented with Bob Fine at Warwick University. The use of original data is admirable, but Fine and Davis have their own agenda, and I found myself in profound disagreement with them as I read on. It was when I came to their final conclusions that I saw most clearly why they were seeing matters so very differently from myself. They had started out with the proposition that the black working class was inchoate and backward, and that the industrialisation after the depression of 1929-31 had produced a large working class, but it was immature and unable to stand up against a ruthless ruling class. With much of this I concur. But their reading led to the conclusion that the trade union movement, built and formed by Max Gordon and Dan Koza, could not have survived once the ruling class decided to clamp down. That was what the Smuts government proposed, and their argument sounds superficially convincing. However, the authors’ treatment of the mineworkers’ strike of 1946, tailored to fit into their thesis, indicates that they had missed the point made by Dunbar Moodie, and somewhat differently by myself, as discussed in Yours For the Union .

The period that is being dealt with here is that of the Second World War. During these years several of the unions, and the Mine Workers Union in particular, were controlled by members of the Communist Party of South Africa. The original impulse for their entry into this union was made during their anti-war period, and the object was to embarrass the government severely. By the time the union was formed, Germany had invaded the USSR, and the position of the CPSA had altered. Henceforth, strikes were to be discouraged and stopped if possible. Officially, the party’s papers said that they understood the reasons for all the industrial action, but urged negotiations or even restraint. Wildcat strikes in the mines were deprecated, and everything was done to get the men back to work as quickly as possible. Eventually, the miners forced through a call for a strike, and the union officials, somewhat tamely, accepted a resolution that the men be called out within a week. Yet the union was completely unprepared. The Council of Non-European Trade Unions (which had previously pledged support) was not informed, and only heard of the decision from the newspapers. It was not even called upon to put into effect its promise of assistance. When the men came out in August 1946, it was not primarily because of allegiance to the union. In most cases the men, hearing of impending action, but not knowing who had called the strike, came out spontaneously. The union leader, JB Marks of the CPSA, carelessly got himself arrested, leading Communists were out of town, the sympathy strike never took place, and the miners were beaten back to work. Little of this is stated by the authors. Instead, Fine and Davis ask socratically whether the unions were not wise in avoiding strike action earlier, and in the same breath suggest that the strike ‘highlighted the inefficiency of the liberal model of industrial relations held by the union leadership in the face of the ruthlessness of the state and mineowners on one side, and the desperate rebelliousness of the mineworkers on the other’.

Obviously the union would encounter ruthless opposition; obviously it would be harassed and intimidated. But the union did little organising, and in its public posturing acted mainly as a body to restrain the workers. The strike might have failed, as Fine and Davis say it had to, but the workers never had a chance. They were driven to desperation, and they were provoked by members of the CPSA to take action after Churchill’s Fulton speech, which opened the way for Truman’s provocative acts in the Mediterranean, and 70,000 miners downed tools. This was less than 20 per cent of the workforce. These details, which provide a different perspective from that of the authors, are bypassed.

In the next chapter, the war that was barely mentioned in chapter one is discussed, but without any position being taken on the role of the left during the war. That is discussed in chapter three, and is used mainly to condemn the Trotskyists. And although they note the switch by the CPSA (in fact a double switch from pro- to anti- and back to pro-war), there is little reference back to the discussion in the first chapter. The reader cannot fault Fine and Davis for their position. That is their prerogative. But it already seems by the time page 30 is reached that this is not a text that might develop a useful Marxist discussion.

Skipping to the third chapter, some of the faults of the book become more marked. Fine and Davis believe that the Trotskyist position was based purely on attacks on the Stalinists. This is not the place to explain once again the struggle against a worldwide movement that was throttling the working class movement. Nor is it my purpose to exculpate the South African Trotskyists for their failure to advance further. However, two interconnecting factors have to be grasped when historians view what happened. Firstly, they must have an understanding, if not empathy, for the persons and the organisations under discussion, and that also means that they must have the facts. Some of us have discussed the events in the South African left for years, but we only published articles or chapters of books when there were documents. Even then we had problems, because only part of the story was revealed in the documents we retrieved. Fine had only part of what has since been found, but it is a travesty of historical writing to proceed on the smell of a rag and write with so little documentation about groups like the Trotskyists.

Chapter three provides one further potted history that, correct as it is in some respects, bowdlerises the story, and gives an account that fails to understand what occurred. Fine did not have access to the theses sent to Trotsky, and, quoting the Workers Voice, he and Davis even date Trotsky’s letter as prior to the thesis on the Native Question. Nor did they have the criticism of Ruth Fischer, or the letters that establish Gordon’s position in Johannesburg as working outside of the Workers Party. Of Gordon they claim that he did not have a programme, and so on. They blunder along until they come to the article on Palestine in The Spark, presumably one of the few copies they found. At last they are on solid ground, and they lambast the writer of that article, correctly, I think, but this tells us little about the group and its work in Cape Town.

The events in the Left Opposition in the 1930s are open to criticism, but this must be placed in some perspective. If, as the authors say, the working class was immature, the problem in Cape Town was the difficulty in forging an alliance between the Coloureds and the smaller African community. It was this that took Goolam Gool into the National Liberation League, but he resigned his official position when he believed that the struggle had been betrayed by leading members of the CPSA. What they did not know was that the Cape Town group had only three activists, only one of whom (Clare Goodlatte) was employed. They wrote and published a journal, they ran a Socialist club, were in financial straits, yet they sent money to a dozen appeals from oppositionists in Europe, and it seems, exhausted themselves over five years in trying to build a movement. The Cape Town Trotskyists made many mistakes, but no study of their actions can ignore the composition of the group. It is also difficult to excuse the early groups in Johannesburg. The fights and splits were execrable. Nonetheless, they did not ignore the white workers—as Fine maintains. They were marginalised by Sachs (an unreformed Stalinist) and those so loosely quoted by the authors. Their only sphere of activity was among the African workers, and it was there that Gordon made his mark. His efforts could have been afforded a less negative appraisal. In like fashion, the caustic comments on the work of the Workers International League could have been tempered, after further reflection, by some positive statements of its work. There were never more than half a dozen activists. They built up a considerable influence in the trade unions, and because of the fragility of the trade unions they were prepared to work with bureaucratic leaders; they cooperated with the teachers in their campaign for better conditions; they worked in community movements (negating Fine’s claim that their policy was syndicalist); they even tried to get a toehold in the white unions, but were rebuffed. They also carried on all the functions of a Socialist movement, holding public meetings, producing a newspaper, pamphlets and journals, and so on. Yes, they made serious errors, and their implosion was inexcusable. But was there nothing they did that pleases Fine and Davis from their elevated positions in the universities, 50 years on?

If that was all, the book would be rather lightweight. The authors do have serious arguments against the all-too-muddled thinking on the national liberation movement, and in a later section of the book, a damning indictment of those (including myself) who became involved in sabotage groups. Theoretically they are correct, but once again it must be said that they do not explore the factors that took so many into the movements that espoused, and practised, violence. That requires a volume in itself, and will be discussed elsewhere. Readers who are prepared to walk warily (and wearily) through the maze of errors generated by Fine and Davis, might wish to explore some of the problems of South Africa with them.

Hillel Ticktin was born in South Africa, studied at the University of Cape Town, and attended lectures by Jack Simons, the doyen of CPSA-SACP theoreticians and later tutor of Umkhonto We Sizwe commissars in Angola. Ticktin obviously believes that Simons represented a considerable advance on other Communists, but to describe Simons as belonging to the left of the CP, is only to call into question the meaning of the word ‘left’. On the campus, Ticktin worked in groups that were sympathetic to the teachings of Leon Trotsky. This made him a natural rebel when he obtained a scholarship given by the ANC for study in the USSR. He emerged from the course convinced that there was no Socialism in the USSR, and no adherence to Marxism. His experiences are partly reflected in his essays in the journal Critique and elsewhere, and in his book on the Soviet Union. His writings illuminated a subject that was otherwise opaque, and he was able to cut through many of the past debates on the nature of that society.

Whilst in the USSR he presented a thesis, researched in the years 1961-65, which provided a comparison of racialism in South Africa and the USA. The thesis was not accepted, he says, because he would not accept the line on the USA demanded of him by his supervisor. This book is an update of the section he wrote on South Africa in the rejected thesis.

This book follows a different path from most other writers on South Africa. Firstly, he makes no concession to the reader’s ability to follow his arguments. He uses language like a bludgeon, assumes that his readers can follow his logic, does not stop to define key concepts, and, when he refers to persons or movements, seems to believe that his readers should know to whom or what he is referring. He is not overconcerned by dull historical facts, the book contains no accounts of class struggles, except for the 1922 general strike, which he needs to buttress his arguments, he says nothing about trade unions or community struggles (which he ascribes, incorrectly, to Stalinist influences), has peculiar ideas of what happened historically, and has only a crude conception of what happened inside the Trotskyist groups. Instead, Ticktin sets his eyes on unravelling the categories through which South Africa should be understood. Only then, he argues, can the nature of the problem in South Africa be explained.

The introduction of new categories in Marxist analyses is a standard procedure, and fruitful if they allow for new, more incisive, interpretations. That is, categories used in a critique of a social structure are invaluable if they allow the investigation to produce new understanding, and uncover hitherto unsuspected connections or contradictions which provide an insight into unfolding events. Such categories should be consistent with the existent corpus of Marxist theory, and if they are new or relatively unknown they must be well defined. If, however, they do not lead to new insights, then, in line with Occam’s razor, they must fall away, because simpler concepts can do the same work more expeditiously. It is my belief that the insights that Ticktin offers in his book, new and perceptive as they are, could have been made without the introduction of his new categories. In fact, these only serve to obscure his analysis, and make his text even less readable.

Requiring a critique of political economy in South Africa, Ticktin introduces, or redefines, four categories. These are abstract labour, declining capitalism, class and surplus product. From these, Ticktin claims, a better understanding of South Africa can be developed, and the nature of racial discrimination can be explained. These categories cannot be discovered empirically (a virtual swearword in his lexicon) and he uses empirically discovered facts sparingly.

One of the hallmarks of critique, recognised by its readers, is that we live in an era of declining capitalism. This assertion can be found in Lenin’s writing on imperialism, and in a speech (and a later letter) by Trotsky in which he presented a graph indicating the period of growth followed by the period of decline of capitalism. Trotsky linked his curve to specific historical turning points. Readers of Critique will have been acquainted with Lenin and Trotsky’s ideas, and have had the opportunity of deciding on their veracity. By starkly asserting the notion of ‘decline of capitalism’ as a category, it is made unquestionable. This has now to be accepted as given, and Ticktin offers no further elaboration in this work. Despite its primacy in Ticktin’s argument, the new reader will find no argument to support this claim.

Thereafter, Ticktin’s thesis depends on his peculiar use of the category ‘abstract labour’. In the first volume of Capital Marx pointed to two components of labour, that which is termed ‘concrete labour’ because it makes use values, and ‘abstract labour’ which produces exchange value. Marx notes later in the volume that Ure, a champion of the new system of production and a rabid anti-trade unionist, envisaged a de-skilled working class in which workers could be used interchangeably anywhere in the factory. That is, the work process would allow for homogeneity, and no workers could halt production by going on strike. It was a fanciful picture, more useful for a Charlie Chaplin production than reality, even if the work process in some sectors of production was increasingly de-skilled.

Ticktin adopts the latter aspect of the work process to define abstract labour. He says of it that ‘specifically it refers to the social reduction of labour to a common form’ (level of labour time, intensity of labour, etc) (p5). For purposes of his critique he then states that in South Africa ‘abstract labour has necessarily to be fractured to maintain the system’, but this has ‘only delayed and hindered but cannot prevent the formation of a black working class’ (p6).

This is quite ingenious. Ticktin, by introducing the word ‘fractured’ has laid the way to introducing ‘racial discrimination’. At the same time, he foresees the future formation of a ‘black working class’—but why this has still to take place, and why it must be black, is not specifically discussed. This seems more like verbal sleight of hand than the basis for new insight. The nature of capitalist production everywhere, despite Ure, rests on the atomisation of the workforce. The class, says Ticktin, depends on the workers banding together as a collectivity—once again with little explanation. But a barrier to this coalescence is the atomisation that is intrinsic to the relations of production. The workers are divided along lines of gender, age and skill. In various countries there are further dividing lines, of religion, ethnicity and colour. These are all exploited in order to weaken the exploited class, and in many societies one or more of these sectors is (or are) coopted into the ruling group. To create a special ease for South Africa seems unnecessary.

The foundation for Ticktin’s thesis has been laid. By adding his concept of ‘surplus product’ he can move to the assertion that the white worker extracts surplus value from the black workers by exercising a limited degree of control over its extraction (p9). The thesis is almost complete. It is only necessary to add that:

‘Capital accumulation in South Africa has been regulated by racial discrimination, a term which has therefore to be understood as a special category of political economy and not just a particular politics of a particular group. It regulates profits, it assists the development of capital in particular directions, it forms the nature of that capital itself.., it contains and directs in particular ways the political economy...’ (p36)

This Ticktin expands, referring to the response to the general strike of 1922 as the ‘watershed’ when racism (which is ubiquitous) was transformed into racial discrimination, and became government policy in response to the strike. His claim is that:

‘A specific division of the surplus product which leads to particular forms of capital accumulation can lead in turn to specific legal and political forms to enforce that particular division. Such is the ease in South Africa... The political forms, in turn, are used to maintain the specific relation... [that is to defend] the particular form of extraction of the surplus product.’ (p49)

Or again:

‘The division of the working class is not an empirical and arbitrary action. It is a considered action under conditions of capitalist decline.’ (p13)

This is a remarkable assertion. Racial discrimination became a fact in South Africa when it was put on the statute books. Was there indeed no racial discrimination in the housing of labour on the diamond fields, or in the body searches? No racial discrimination in the divisions created on the goldmines, or in the Chamber of Mines’ agitation for a pass law in the 1890s? No racial discrimination in housing, jobs, pay, health protection, pass restrictions and so on? Was it not rather necessary to put the date forward to fit the assertion that racial discrimination is a modern response utilising forms and doctrines of an earlier period... [which] can only be appreciated in a context where a declining capitalist class [my emphasis] accepted a policy to which they were opposed, rather than lose all’ (p9). The category is extended. In this short review only a few passages can be quoted:

‘Racial discrimination divides the workers, so preventing the formation of a class under conditions when industrialisation tends towards the formation of a relatively homogeneous mass of workers. It performs this act by paying the discriminated workers below the value of their labour power.’ (p3)

From this it follows that the difference between South Africa and other countries is that the majority is discriminated against, permitting the white workers to get much higher pay (cf p3).

There are other categories like ‘superexploitation’, but they are undefined in the text and are ancillary to the argument as a whole.

How this makes the analysis any more penetrating is not easily determined. Ticktin’s predictions are not any more acute than those of other Marxists who do not find it very valuable to introduce the categories he favours—and do not make it any easier to operate inside the political arena of South Africa. Even more important is the lifelessness of the writing. There is no discussion of the changing structure of the country, nor of the political struggles, nor of the political organisations. But then, as Ticktin stresses, this is not a history book. For that the reader should perhaps rejoice. When the author does use historical facts he is so often at fault that one becomes appalled at his slipshod carelessness. To draw up a calendar of errors would be tedious. But some should be noted.

Ticktin’s knowledge of the Trotskyist movement is rudimentary. He claims, on the basis of a conversation, that Trotsky’s letter was an answer to a letter from Burlak (p2). He also maintains that the move to organising blacks on a community basis was the fruit of the CPSA’s policies (which he abhors). There is no doubt, that in the violent move to the left in the early 1930s, the CPSA organised in the townships. In the late 1930s they repeated this in the Cape. But it was the Trotskyists who worked in community organisations after 1943, and never stopped working in such areas. There is no good reason to condemn either movement for so doing. Why, then, twist the facts?

He claims that peasants had no desire to immolate themselves in mines, and that draconian measures were required to secure them (p22), unaware that the first such workers in the diamond and gold mines were sent by the chiefs to earn the money to buy arms and ammunition, or came from Mozambique where large numbers welcomed work in the mines to escape the forced labour imposed by the Portuguese. Rhodes only introduced his oppressive measures to maintain the flow of workers from the Reserves to the mines.

Ticktin fails completely to differentiate between workers in the mines in the 1920s, who wanted a black labour force to do the drilling underground, and workers in transport and industry who wanted the black labourers forced out of town (p24). This is not an aristocracy of labour issue, nor of declining capitalism—but of alterations in the nature of the urban economy and the specific interests of white workers.

The short description of the 1922 strike in the book is highly contentious. It is not true that the CPSA took a leading role, although some of its members controlled the initial committee. There was no Johannesburg Soviet in 1922. This body (which was called a soviet but did not vaguely resemble one), was set up in 1919, and is discussed in Searchlight South Africa, no 1.

The list can be extended, taking in errors and dubious generalisations. Ticktin presents ‘facts’ that he wants to use in his thesis. In order to condemn the Stalinists, and they were to blame for many things, he decided that they were Browderites after the war. To buttress this he said that Earl Browder was the postwar leader of the CPUSA (p60). This is quite absurd. Browder was the party Secretary during the war, and called for the dissolution of the Communist Party after the Teheran conference in 1943. If Stalin could join with Roosevelt and Churchill in laying the foundations of a new world, he said, then the Communists could work with the American financiers. Many South African Communist leaders agreed with him. Then, in May 1945, after Jacques Duclos, Secretary of the French party, condemned Browder’s liquidationism, the latter was removed from his posts. The South Africans followed suit. This did not reverse the reformist role of many Communist leaders, but Browderism was officially dead.

There is a third book, rescued from the travel notes of Ralph Bunche in 1937, part of which has bearing on the history of the Trotskyists. Because of the later rejection of Bunche by the left (and this is mentioned in Bob Edgar’s epilogue), it is necessary to quote briefly from the introduction. In this Edgar indicates that Bunche was radicalised in the depression years, and moved towards Marxism, but was wary of the CPSA, and never became a party member. Addressing the problems of the blacks in the USA, he claimed that their problems were an outgrowth of class exploitation. That is, ‘racialism is a myth, albeit a dangerous one, for it is a specific stalking-horse for selfish group politics and camouflages economic exploitation’ (p7). He saw that black leaders would not change because their positions depended on appeals to race, and because they could not comprehend how blacks were sidelined by the broader economic and social conditions at work. Consequently, he rejected appeals for self-determination (as decreed by the Comintern) or for advancement through business enterprises. In his early writing, Bunche viewed colonisers in Africa as manipulating race as an instrument of domination and exploitation... Bunche’s notes on his journey through South Africa consist largely of accounts of his meetings with personalities from the trade unions, the Communist Party, and with leading liberals and leaders of the national movements. His visits to the townships provide us with vivid accounts of the lives of the urban blacks, of their traditions (both tribal and modern), and their living conditions. It is an account that provides a witness’ survey of poverty, squalor, and oppression. It is from such accounts that the historian can partly reconstruct life as it was—and one that should be compulsory reading for would-be authors.

This is not the place to offer a review of a volume of nearly 400 pages, but there is interest for those who want to read about another side of Trotskyist activities. Bunche attended the third conference of the All-African Convention in 1937 at which Tabata, Janub Gool and Goolam Gool were present. His account contradicts that presented by Tabata’s history of the AAC, and comes close to the criticisms printed in the WPSA’s journal, The Spark. Bunche’s diarised entries speak of wasted sessions spent in trivialities, of disorder, and the side-tracking of any serious suggestions made by the ‘radicals’. Many delegates left the gathering in despair, with the feeling that there was little purpose in the AAC surviving.

Bunche was even-handed. From the conference of the AAC he went on to the gathering of the ANC. His account of that body was, if anything, even more scathing than that of the AAC. Quite obviously, the petit-bourgeoisie was timorous and self-serving. The only time they came alive in either of the two conferences was when the question of blacks in business was discussed at the AAC. Even that was more a matter of anecdotal discussions of those Africans who had failed in their enterprises, and those stories led to uproarious laughter! It is salutary to note that these were the people with whom the members of the WPSA had to work.

Bunche met few Trotskyists—but there were few to meet. The Johannesburg group had collapsed in the wake of the departure of Lee and his friends, and Dladla, former Secretary of the Johannesburg branch, said to Bunche there were no revolutionaries in South Africa. When he met Gordon, it was to hear about trade union progress. As for Cape Town, the Communist League was just about to reform after their stay in the Socialist Party, and the WPSA did not often meet with people outside their ranks. Consequently, Bunche met them only at the conference of the AAC. The comments on the gathering of the AAC will have to be taken seriously by those who want to understand the politics of black nationalism in the 1930s.

Baruch Hirson