Originally published as the editorial of Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 18/19 (February 1986).
The fiery movement of 1984-85, still unquenched, has revealed to the black working class (and to the world) its own giant potential as a revolutionary conqueror.
We have seen the inability of the regime to crush the revolutionary movement by brutal repression. In the political turmoil of 1986 we can see, and will see revealed more clearly, the incapacity of the ruling class to avoid revolution by ‘reform’, negotiation and deceit.
A central task of militants in this period is to hammer this home in the consciousness of the masses, as it is brought to light in day-to-day experience.
Revolution is not a single cataclysm, but a protracted series of battles inevitably interspersed with lulls; hard-fought advances mixed with phases of stalemate, setback and even defeat. Through the whole uneven process, the crisis of the old society deepens, rotting its defences; the bearers of the new society learn, prepare and assemble the forces capable of a decisive victory.
In South Africa, with the regime and its firmly-based state of white supremacy so formidably difficult to overthrow, this process is likely to extend over five, ten or more years.
What are the main features of the present phase?
Eighteen months of spreading township-based insurrections (see here), where the youth have pitted themselves almost bare-handed against the unyielding armoury of the state, have resulted, at least for the present, in a stalemate of the forces facing each other on that terrain.
Viewed country-wide, it must be acknowledged that the former momentum of mass action in the townships has ebbed. Yet fierce eruptions of resistance continue in many areas.
Tens of thousands of activists, especially youth, remain ready to confront the police, and are organising without let-up at local level. A solid basis of street committees, previously widespread only in the Eastern Cape, is even now spreading through other regions.
Youth Congresses are taking root in the most isolated localities. School youth, undeterred by the ban on COSAS, are rebuilding their organisations and cementing links with working youth.
The launch of Cosatu has raised both the political and industrial confidence of the working class. A wave of intense industrial struggles is in progress, with factory occupations (siyalala la) coming to the fore. The task of unionising the unorganised into Cosatu is a priority for every activist.
The persistent mood of confident defiance – the conviction that time is on our side and that we shall ultimately gain the victory – characterises most of the black working class.
While stepping-up the shootings and other attacks on activists, the regime has derived scant political advantage from the stalemate. So far, reaction has only edged forward.
Botha has felt compelled, without delay, to retreat further into promises of political and social ‘reform’ – on the pass laws, on citizenship, on the “national statutory council” supposed to incorporate African collaborators by invitation into central government and counter the overwhelming demand for majority rule.
So transparently devious are the regime’s manoeuvres – so universally distrusted have its promises become – that if Botha handed out R10 notes people would assume them counterfeit.
The regime is driven increasingly to make concessions. Yet every measly concession it can make is too little and too late.
Its dilemma is shown over Nelson Mandela’s release. Continued imprisonment of the ANC leader – supposed to isolate him from the people – now constantly inflames their anger and highlights his jailers’ isolation instead.
Yet to release him into South Africa with the lava of resistance still hot, fills the regime with fear of the tremendous mass eruption that this concession could provoke. So they prevaricate still, hoping that the movement can be dampened down sufficiently, or a formula agreed, to allow for his release.
In this, a relatively simple matter to resolve, the impasse of the regime is summed-up.
Both the fact of Botha’s ‘reforms’ and their contemptible emptiness are the result of the unconquered power building-up in the black working class. The ruling class cannot rest on racist repression alone. But neither can it concede any genuine democracy, for fear that its power and property will be wrested from it.
Votes for all would “end investment” in SA, Finance Minister du Plessis advised the House of ‘Representatives’.[1] “One man, one vote in a unitary state … will lead to a socialist dictatorship in South Africa,” Botha bluntly told Business Week.[2]
A crude recognition of the class war underlying the struggle for democracy… but essentially a correct one. In it the fears of the scheming, smiling liberal bourgeois, with their anti-democratic ‘federal’ policies, are also summed-up.
They all hate the dictatorship against capital – the complete democracy for the mass of people – that would result from the triumph of working class power.
Just as an insolvent debtor cannot fool his creditors for ever, so political bankrupts also come to the end of the road. While he may contrive to obscure the fact for a time, Botha’s strategy of step-by-step constitutional adaptations, designed to draw black middle class ‘leaders’ into the maintenance of the system, now lies in ruins.
The uncompromising nature of the black working class movement, and nothing else, has brought this about.
Inescapably, the first concern of South Africa’s State President is to defend the dictatorship of capital against the black working class by maintaining the efficiency of the military-police machine. This is built on white domination and cannot be fundamentally reformed. Only a revolution can shatter and dismantle it.
Botha is unable to concede any real power to the people. He is compelled to use with unrelenting ferocity the racist state machine. He has to placate white racism to hold the state together, and avoid the growing challenge from his right. The tricameral fiasco rejected by all black communities, the corrupt stooges in them figures of public loathing, he can now produce only the most ludicrous constitutional tinkering in his attempts to offer the black masses an ‘alternative’ to revolution.
Within days of ‘Rubicon II’, Botha had to repudiate his side-kick Pik for the merest suggestion that a black might one day become President. Even Buthelezi, impatient for a seat in the oppressors’ central government, had to back away hastily from the ‘national statutory council’ fraud.
Now even the surviving councillors of the West Rand Councils’ Association – creatures of the regime’s own earlier, discredited and half-demolished scheme of ‘reform’ – have themselves rejected Botha’s invitation to participate in the ‘national statutory council’ and declared a ‘boycott’!
“We refuse to allow ourselves to be seen to be competing with national political leaders and organisations,” they said, feeling the fires at their feet.
Political leaders are in jail, exile and detention and some are dead. The leaders of the people shall and will reserve the undisputed right of political participation!
Cape Times, 13 February 1986
The ingredients are now present for a renewed political crisis within the NP regime, and in white politics generally. Both the Nationalists and the PFP opposition are ridden with infighting and incipient splits. This is an indication that neither possesses a coherent or convincing strategy for dealing with the revolutionary challenge of the black working class.
The resignation of Slabbert as PFP leader and as MP has highlighted the bankruptcy of the ruling class’s snails-pace ‘reform’ program based upon the institutions of parliament and the state.
The rise of a revolutionary mass movement of black workers and youth, and the overwhelming gravitation of this movement to the banner of Congress, means that the banned ANC and its imprisoned and exiled leadership are thrust to centre stage in any serious attempt of the capitalists to effect a ‘negotiated’ rescue of their system.
Slabbert seeks a new role as an extra-parliamentary ‘broker’ between the ruling class and the ANC. Quite wrongly, the ANC leadership has welcomed him as a friend. Let us not forget that, barely weeks ago, he was discussing secretly with Botha how, together, they might “overcome” the ANC.[3]
Today, though by a different route, he and his fellow liberals aim still to “overcome” the ANC – to overcome, that is, the revolutionary democratic and socialist aspirations of the ANC’s mass working class support.
The ANC leadership should publicly expose and reject the manoeuvres of all agents of capitalism to ensnare it in the defence of that rotten, tyrannical and exploitative system.
Unavoidably, a protracted process is involved in the movement preparing itself for victory.
We have to build two, three, ten times the strength of Congress organisation among the black working class which exists today. We have to link more effectively the industrial, youth and community struggles on a national scale, under unified revolutionary leadership.
We have to exploit every phase and aspect of the crisis of the racist and capitalist system, using non-racial socialist policies both to unite the oppressed working people in action and to divide the whites on class lines.
As a mass movement we have to gain the means, and develop the tactics, of using arms in the defence of our organisations and communities against ‘vigilantes’, Inkatha impis, and the police and army.
Only by this painstaking route can we eventually disarm politically and then forcibly conquer the SA state.
Failing to grasp this reality of our struggle, the ANC leadership throughout 1985 proclaimed as the task an immediate Iran-style insurrection and head-on attack on the state to capture power. That did not and could not eventuate.
Now that the necessary, essentially defensive uprisings within the townships have reached stalemate with the state – now that the road to revolution seems barred again by the formidable armoury of white power – the ANC leadership, without explanation, has swung to a new but no less mistaken tack.
As we go to press, comrade Thabo Mbeki, ANC publicity director in Lusaka, is reported as saying: “We are talking not of overthrowing the Government, but of turning so many people against it that it would be forced to do what Ian Smith had to do” – namely concede majority rule![4]
For this purpose the leadership is striving to achieve a “realignment of forces” on its side, including businessmen and even “homeland leaders” (among them the Kwangwane puppet dictator and 19 of his ‘cabinet’ who are visiting Lusaka) against the Botha regime.
The ANC leaders should have learned from their earlier disastrous mistake of fraternising with and assisting Gatsha Buthelezi and Inkatha (see here).
Any collaboration with stooges of the state, or with capitalist agents of any type, can only serve to disarm the revolutionary movement of the black working class, which is the only force that can ensure national and social liberation in South Africa.
Our objection is not merely that the Lancaster House settlement in Zimbabwe led to a regime which, while supported by the majority of workers, now represses and controls the working class on behalf of capitalism.
The crucial point is that, in South Africa – an industrial and military power with a privileged white population five million strong – the racist state will not be “forced” to accept majority rule as in Zimbabwe, but will serve as the bastion for a vicious reaction that will drag the country through civil war before it is overthrown.
The SA capitalists, compelled to choose between the state and revolution, cannot and will not break with that power which, in the last analysis, secures their property and profits.
The pursuit of ‘negotiated settlement’ in South Africa – the hope for a ‘democratic compromise’ with capitalism – is a delusion which can disastrously weaken our movement, and lead to the unnecessary sacrifice of many thousands of lives of black workers and youth, who should be armed politically and physically for revolution.
The task before our movement in the period ahead is clear. It is to prepare the way for the conquest of state power by the black working class – for the democratic and socialist revolution bound together.
The priority now is organisation, organisation and again organisation.
As in the past, a combination of industrial struggles, specific political campaigns and community struggles over rents, transport, education, etc., will be the vehicle for mass mobilisation and involvement – and provide the context for revolutionary consciousness to be raised.
A united front of Cosatu with the UDF, on a clear program of national action, can give to these campaigns a far greater effectiveness than ever before. This will, demonstrate to the working class its immense potential political power once mobilised and united nationally.
We must meet the target of one million members for the Cosatu unions during 1986. We must strengthen and extend the Youth Congresses, linking them together and preparing the launch of a national Youth Congress which cannot be crushed.
We must build country-wide the network of democratic street committees pioneered by Matthew Goniwe on the pattern of the M-plan. Linked to the youth organisations, to the civics and to the local union committees, these will form the foundation, not only for sustaining the struggle under the worst repression, but for the exercise of working class political power.
Here too lies the basis for carrying out the foremost task of this period. It is to build the ANC itself inside the country, as a mass organisation – under working class leadership and control, locally, regionally and nationally – fighting on a clear socialist program. We demand the unbanning of the ANC and all banned organisations.
We demand the unconditional release of Nelson Mandela and all political prisoners, and the freedom of exiles to return. We must fight to back-up these demands upon the regime. But we should not leave it at that.
Already, through the building and survival of the UDF, through the Youth Congresses, through the street committees, through the launching of Cosatu, through the raising of the ANC flag everywhere at the head of the movement, the regime’s banning of Congress has been proved unenforceable. It is time to take the next step.
Let the ANC itself ‘return’! Let it rise now as the mass political organisation of the black working class. We have the power to build it, and in so doing transform it into an effective instrument of revolution. The task rests on every activist.
Workers and youth!
Build a mass ANC on a socialist program!
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2021).
[1] Cape Times, 12 February 1986
[2] 7 October 1985
[3] Cape Times, 20 February 1986
[4] Reported by Allister Sparks in the Observer, 2 March 1986.
