What brought an end to South African apartheid?

Deji Olayinka, Socialist Party Black and Asian group

30 years ago, the inspirational movement of the South African masses brought an end to the horrific apartheid regime, the process concluding with elections in April 1994. The Black majority was finally able to vote, and the African National Congress (ANC) was elected into government.

Apartheid was  introduced from 1948, codifying  and developing 300 years of segregation and exploitation used by British, and before that Dutch, colonialism and imperialism. It started when colonialists used force to dispossess the indigenous population from the land. The colonial ‘reserves’ system assigned at least 87% of land to white owners, while the original inhabitants were forced into brutal exploitative work on the colonialists’ stolen land, and to live confined to the reserves.

Especially from the 1880s, the ruling class in South Africa made its wealth through the exploitation of cheap labour to extract gold and minerals, which brought in the capital later used to create manufacturing industry. This migrant labour system was fundamental to South African capitalists’ wealth. A pool of cheap, precarious and temporary workers in the reserves could be drawn on to work in mines and urban centres.

The separation of workers from their families, who were stuck in the reserves, meant the capitalists had less pressure to concede housing and amenities, and provide welfare to the sick, unemployed and elderly. One South African Marxist described the reserves as “vast rural slums which served as concentration camps for the unemployed.”

Capitalist division

The capitalist class in South Africa was always too weak to maintain its rule alone. As capitalism developed, it created an extremely polarised society with a tiny and insignificant middle class, too small and weak for the capitalist class to lean on as a social basis, like it could in other older capitalist countries of Europe. Instead, it had to deliberately harden and enforce racial divisions, and concede privileges to white workers to cultivate a white labour aristocracy that could form a social and political base for their system.

A broad range of measures were brought in to maintain this system and to prevent the working class from organising. An internal passport system called the pass laws, succeeded by the influx control laws, restricted the movement of Africans. This kept the workers in the reserves but was also used to break up organising efforts. Thousands of strikers and workers’ leaders were banned, “endorsed out” of towns and forcibly deported to reserves.

Despite many great hurdles, the South African masses were able to build a revolutionary movement with the aim of overcoming the double oppression they endured – both the national oppression by the white-minority regime and ruthless capitalist exploitation.

The African masses had fought bravely against colonial conquest from the very start, for example the Xhosa and Zulu peoples have a heroic history of struggle. There was no period without rebellion, but they were brutally suppressed. In 1960, there were struggles against the pass law that were savagely suppressed. 69 people were murdered by police during the Sharpeville Massacre, most shot in the back as they fled.

A state of emergency was called and the ANC, the main political body in the fight against apartheid, was banned. Although it was not a socialist programme, the ANC’s core principals outlined in the Freedom Charter included the demand that “the mineral wealth beneath the soil, the banks and monopoly industry shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole” and that land is “redivided amongst those who work it”.

In the face of brutal repression, it was the strength of the movement of the South African working class which was decisive in overthrowing the regime.

The 1960s was a period of global economic boom but also of working-class revolutionary movements, which in turn inspired other workers internationally.

Trade unions

Mass trade unionism had attempted to grow in South Africa previously, only to be crushed: the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union in the 1920s, the Confederation of Non-European Trade Unions in the 1940s, South African Congress of Trade Unions in the 1950s. But from the struggles and repression of the 1960s, independent trade unionism flourished again on an unprecedented scale.

The Durban dock strike of 1969 was a major step in raising the confidence of workers, leading to national strike action which peaked with the 1973 Natal strikes.  A number of activists who would, later in the decade, go on to form the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT),  the Socialist Party’s sister organisation in South Africa, played an important role in this struggle. This experience showed the power of organised labour and in 1974-75 Black trade union membership doubled and tripled.

In 1976, the apartheid regime overestimated its control and mandated that Afrikaans – a language associated with apartheid and Dutch colonialism – be taught to all children. High school youth in Soweto bravely rose in strikes and protests against this policy and apartheid. Around half of South Africa’s Black population was younger than 16, so it was a key moment. Responding to the appeals of their children, workers across Soweto and the wider region took repeated strike action in the first political strikes since the banning of the ANC. This was brutally cracked down on, and over 1,000 workers and youth were killed in 1976.

There was a brief lull before the working class and its organisations – most importantly the trade unions – rose in mass struggle again. The apartheid regime attempted to make concessions to limit the aspirations of the union movement. In 1979, it accepted Africans’ legal right to form trade unions. Coloured, Indian and African workers united together in action. Importantly, for the first time since the 1940s, amongst the new union members was a small number of white workers who had recognised their class interests were in line with those of the masses, not of the white bosses. Between 1979-1983 union membership had risen from 70,000 to 300,000. Momentum was building. In 1979, 1980, and 1981 there were 101, 207, and 342 strike days.

In the wake of the Soweto uprisings, the Congress of South African Students was formed. Importantly, the youth and workers united in struggle.By 1982 they had adopted the theme of ‘student-worker action’. The youth campaigned with a revolutionary aim on broad social issues of high rents and transport costs etc, explaining that these struggles can only be sustainably won by uniting them with the political battle for the socialist transformation of society. They had instinctively used Trotsky’s transitional method.

The 1980s was a period of mass struggle that doomed the apartheid regime. The regime desperately turned to repression to stop the movement, but that only strengthened opposition. In May 1985, a state of emergency was called again but the workers’ movement defied it and formed the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Socialism

In 1987, COSATU held a congress under the slogan “Socialism means freedom” and it adopted the ANC’s Freedom Charter as the political manifesto of the trade union movement. COSATU united 2 million workers, Black and Coloured, together in the factories and workplaces. With this strength, the masses could ultimately end the apartheid regime.

The ANC leadership pointed to four pillars of struggle: diplomatic isolation (which included economic and arms embargoes), the sports and cultural boycott, the armed struggle, and the struggle of the masses inside the country.

While all of these had an effect, it was really the last of these, specifically the action of the working class, that was decisive in ending apartheid. The ANC leadership were and are fearful of the independent initiative of the working class as a class, and so downplayed its critical role.

For much of the ANC leadership, the armed struggle was understood as a means to apply pressure to the regime to bring it to the negotiating table. The ANC’s paramilitary even killed Black civilians through its shootings and bombings.

There was clearly a role for democratically organised and armed self-defence of the movement, particularly on strikes and demonstrations to protect against state terror, police raids, pass law arrests and forced removals etc. But it was the mass struggle itself, not simply armed struggle, that could end the apartheid regime.

The South African workers’ brave mass struggle and strike action attracted the support of the international workers’ movement. In Britain, the Socialist Party (at that time named Militant) called for workers’ sanctions and direct links with the trade unions to support the workers’ struggles –  factory-to-factory links, exchange visits between workers’ representatives, and the forming of international combine committees.

Union workers based at Heathrow Airport helped smuggle literature into South Africa. In shopfloor meetings, workers agreed methods to support the movement against apartheid, in many cases workers’ boycotts were organised to stop the handling of South African products. This was important as South African capitalism was supported by imperialist powers.

In contrast, many of the capitalist classes internationally supported the apartheid regime until they felt assured that their economic interests would be protected by the ANC leadership. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president Ronald Reagan vetoed UN imposition of economic sanctions on South Africa.

Sanctions

The capitalist class in Britain and the US had the most economic involvement, and so it wasn’t until very late in the 1980s that they applied sanctions. Even then, they made sure the sanctions were light enough to not seriously harm their multinational companies’ investments.

From the early 1980s the capitalists, faced with a growing mass movement that looked likely to make apartheid untenable, worked to deradicalise the ANC leadership, attempting to ensure their capitalist exploitation could continue.

Leaders were pulled into secret talks to isolate them from rank-and-file members and activists. Nelson Mandela’s wife, Winnie, recognised he had been moved from Robben Island to Pollsmoor Prison in 1982 to disconnect him from the rest of the movement.

Even before the ANC were voted into government in 1994, the Freedom Charter was abandoned in favour of the watered-down social-democratic Reconstruction and Development Programme. This was in turn abandoned as soon as 1996, replaced with a fully neoliberal programme for government. The party leadership, including Nelson Mandela, did not want to enact anything that broke with capitalist interests. It was clear that the ANC would get a landslide victory because of that popular programme. And so, in an attempt to reduce the pressure to enact it, the election results were manipulated to give it a lower majority.

The end of the apartheid era took place against the background of collapse of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist states. With that came a period of ideological triumphalism from the capitalists, and an ideological setback for the working class internationally.

The Stalinist states weren’t socialist, they were ruled by a privileged totalitarian elite running things in their own narrow interests. But the regimes did rest on nationalised planned economies, the existence of which were proof of an alternative to a capitalist economy.

Stalinists in the South African Communist Party and others in the movement called for a two-stage approach, limiting the anti-apartheid movement to the struggle for democratic rights and reforms within capitalism and opposing the socialist change, that was widely recognised among the working class and youth as necessary, until South African capitalism could be fully developed. The MWT argued against this approach, recognising that capitalism, leaving wealth and power in the hands of the capitalist elite, could not bring about the change required.

Writing in his 1994 pamphlet ‘From Slavery to the Smashing of Apartheid’, Socialist Party Political Secretary Peter Taaffe asked: “How long will it be before an ANC government sends in police and army units against striking workers or rebellious inhabitants of the African townships?.. The coalition government, with the ANC as a majority, will be subject to remorseless contrary and counter-class pressures. Mandela and the right of the ANC have already bent the knee to capitalism, both within the country and on an international scale” (See ‘The Negotiated Settlement and the 1994 Elections’ at marxistworkersparty.org.za).

Peter’s prediction was confirmed in the most horrific way with the Marikana massacre in 2012, when 34 striking miners at the Lonmin platinum mine were killed by the police. Cyril Ramaphosa, the current ANC President of South Africa, was then a major shareholder in Lonmin. Today it’s clear to see that the issues experienced under apartheid have not been resolved under capitalism. The ‘official’ unemployment rate among Black South Africans is 37.6%, the Black masses remain excluded, with white people holding 65.9% of top management-level posts and a large but precarious  Black ‘middle class’.

In May this year, the ANC lost its majority for the first time, to be replaced by a Government of National Unity – an attempt to bring political stability in a country still wracked by huge inequality and brutal capitalist exploitation.

It was the working-class masses that brought an end to apartheid, and it will be the working-class masses that are the driving force to bring about a socialist transformation of society in South Africa and around the world.