Originally published in Inqaba ya Basebenzi No. 8 (November 1982).
by Richard Monroe
P.W. Botha’s package of ‘constitutional reform’ has been put forward as a step towards ‘power-sharing’ between the white minority and the black majority, and a means of stabilising SA society against revolution.
These measures have been forced on our rulers by the unprecedented pressure exerted on them by the black working class and all layers of the oppressed, struggling for political rights, decent wages, homes, jobs, education and health – for an end to racial oppression, dictatorship and exploitation.
Yet, far from sharing power, this constitutional change is in fact a recipe for greater concentration of power in the hands of the ruling class.
For the African people, today an overwhelming majority of 21 million in a population of 27 million, these proposals do not change the essential features of the SA constitution of 1910. Government will continue as the dictatorship of state bureaucrats, backed up by the batons and guns of the police and army.
At the same time as announcing its reforms, the Botha government has drawn up the Orderly Movement and Settlement of Black Persons Bill, strengthening its powers to drive jobless and homeless Africans from the cities to the Bantustan graveyards.
Even before this law is passed in parliament, it is already being put into practice. In the Cape in October, 2,000 Africans were rounded up in night-time raids and fined a total of R50,000 for pass offences. On the Rand also, raids, evictions and deportations are being stepped-up by the Administration Boards.
Botha has announced new plans for Bantustan ‘land consolidation’ – which would involve the forced resettlement of another half million blacks, to add to the two million driven from their homes since 1960.
More than ever, African working people, and with them all Africans, are regarded by the rulers of SA as foreigners in the country of their birth, which they have built with their sweat and blood.
Originating in the conquest of this country by European capitalism, the baasskap dictatorship over the dispossessed African people was entrenched in the 1910 constitution. Then as now it exists to guarantee the lifeblood of capitalist profits – the cheap labour of African workers.
To preserve its system, the ruling class has no option but to maintain this dictatorship of national oppression over the majority.
Today, in a period of world capitalist crisis, the profits of the capitalists depend more than ever on the poverty wages of the majority of workers. Without cheap labour, in a weak industrial country competing with the huge industrial powers, SA capitalism would face collapse.
This is why the movement of the working class, of the youth, and of all the oppressed, has to put up such a hard and bitter fight for each small gain. This is also why our rulers try to muster all their forces to reverse our gains and crush the organisations which we have built over the years.
They are conscious of the crisis of their system, yet can offer no other solution.
Joop de Loor, government Director of Finance, admits that “during the 1980s and even the 1990s” the economy has a “sheer inability” to meet housing needs, which would require building over 100,000 homes a year.[1] During the 1970s only 20,000 houses were built a year – and every day homes are being demolished.
Fanie Botha, Minister of Manpower, says employers must create 250,000 jobs a year just to reduce the level of the unemployed. But in workplace after workplace both government and private employers are laying people off.
The bosses’ own ‘experts’ reveal the extent of poverty and malnutrition; yet every month they raise again the price of bread, milk, meat or other essentials.
Even the big capitalists’ promises to the African middle class have not been carried out. Their most advertised ‘reform’ has been leasehold home ownership in the townships – but in five years only 1,500 leases have been signed!
The capitalists claim that it is agitators who stir up mass resistance. In reality it is the daily struggle for survival forced upon all the oppressed that brings broader and broader layers of working people into struggle.
More and more this struggle will bring forward the demand for democratic rights as the means for achieving decent conditions of life – above all for majority rule. One person, one vote, in an undivided SA!
Unable to satisfy the material demands of the masses, the ruling class is intransigently opposed to any political concession that would give democratic power to the working people. Every section of the ruling class and its political representatives – not only the Nationalist and Conservative Parties, but the Progressive Federal Party too – is terrified of the prospect of majority rule.
They fear the enormous pressures which any government elected on this basis would be under from the black working class to abolish the pass laws and the migrant labour system, to redistribute wealth, to build homes and to increase wages in defiance of the laws of the profit system.
The capitalists can see the growing popularity of the Freedom Charter, with its demand for the expropriation of their property in the banks, the mines, and the monopolies. Under workers’ democratic management and control, and on the basis of a socialist plan of production, public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy is the key to securing all our other demands.
Protect Ownership
To protect their ownership of the means of production, on which their wealth and their power over us depend, the capitalist class must try to strengthen and stabilise their rule over us. This is the purpose of all the constitutional schemes they are debating, and of Botha’s proposals themselves.
But what is becoming clearer is the intractable problems they face in achieving their aims.
The long-lived stability of the SA capitalist state has depended on the support given to it by the privileged whites. Entrenching divisions which grew up in conquest, the capitalist class drew increasing layers of the whites, including white workers, into a laager of privilege against the excluded ‘native’ majority of the people.
In the factories, the townships and the countryside; in the pass offices, the labour bureaus, the courts and the prisons, the bosses’ rule has been exercised by the white baasskap of foremen and supervisors, white petty bureaucrats and Bantustan bureaucrats, and vicious uniformed thugs.
But over the last ten years, against the militant determination of the mass movement, spearheaded by a black working class stronger than ever before, this method of rule has been losing its power to terrorise the masses.
Today the whip of baasskap rouses the fighting anger of working people, particularly the youth, to end once and for all the humiliations suffered for generations.
This is why imperialism and big business have repeatedly urged the NP government to reform the racist system. The growing revolutionary threat to capitalist rule could, they hope, be staved-off if the SA state machine could be given a non-racial colouration.
Their aims are not to democratise the state. The most significant part of Botha’s constitutional package is the establishment of an Executive Presidency, with virtually unchecked powers, in control of the state machine. Even the traditional influence of the white voters on the state will become much weakened.
Not even the most ‘liberal’ section of the ruling class opposes the establishment of an Executive Presidency.
In recent years decision-making has been more and more concentrated in the hands of unelected, and even secret, committees of bureaucrats, businessmen, and the tops of the military and police. Rather than the Cabinet, it is the State Security Council – whose membership is not even fully known – which guides government policy.
In anticipation of coming struggles, big business seeks to bring the central core of the dictatorship in the civil service and the armed forces more directly under its sway.
Imperialism and big business want to draw the elite layers of the black population into support for this state machinery and its use against the working masses – but without sacrificing the reliability of white support.
Whatever may be said, the support of the whites remains indispensable to the survival of capitalism in SA. It is because of the need to maintain this support that the regime has found it so difficult to move decisively to ‘reform’ the method of government. Hence the repeated zig-zags and periods of paralysis on the part of the government.
Offer Nothing
Botha’s proposals offer nothing to the black majority. But that the NP has committed itself to them is a turning-point in white politics, reflecting the depth of the crisis faced by the ruling class.
In the past the majority of whites looked to the NP government as the unquestioned guarantor of exclusive white privilege and supremacy. For some thirty years the NP has dominated white politics as the natural party of government.
Now, on the issue of “healthy (!) power-sharing (!!)”, Botha has been prepared to irreversibly split the NP, creating a new period of volatility and fluidity in white politics. Built-in NP majorities are no longer secure.
All whites have been taught for generations to cling to the ruling establishment against the danger of being ‘swamped’ by the black majority. But, while continuing to depend critically on white support, the ruling class has to cope with economic and political crisis. It is no longer in a position to provide solid guarantees of white privilege and status.
Not only are the high living standards of the whites being slowly eroded. Now, more importantly, they are faced with constitutional proposals that dilute such ‘democratic’ rights and privileges as they have enjoyed, and that offer no certainties for the future.
“How long will it be before majority rule?” asked white voters in the Germiston by-election.
For a period, most whites are likely to give Botha’s proposals a chance, as was shown by the results of the most recent by-elections.
On the other hand, the Conservative Party has now emerged with a solid and ‘respectable’ pedigree – while the ultra-right racist demagogy of the HNP leaders can at this stage win support only from the most backward sections of the whites.
The CP has substantial reserves of support in the Broederbond, the NGK, the Afrikaans-language press and the public service. Its leaders will be ready to exploit the fears of whites as problems and pitfalls emerge in implementing the new constitution.
They will use the same argument as Jaap Marais (which has more than a grain of truth in it) – that reform arouses expectations among the blacks which, because they cannot be fulfilled, prepare the way for revolution.
They will accuse the government of over-precipitate concessions. They will point out the impotence of the government in the face of new levels of mass upsurge.
It cannot be ruled out that the CP could come to power.
Imperialism and Big Business would strive to prevent this because, as one editor put it, “an about turn is not possible without bringing black frustration to the boil”.[2]
But a Treurnicht-type government, no less than Botha’s, would have to keep the capitalist train on the rails. It would be faced with all the same dilemmas and irreconcilable antagonisms on an even more intense level.
As a result of the constraints of office, such a government would inevitably disappoint the expectations of CP supporters. This, in turn, could push embittered sections of whites further to the right.
Underlying the confusion, fear, volatility and potential for reaction among the whites is the inability of the capitalist system to provide security, democracy, or social justice for the majority of the people.
Turmoil
The capitalist state machine must continue to rest on the support of the whites, however reactionary they may become. But the political turmoil among the whites, which will undoubtedly increase in the years ahead, represents not a strengthening but a weakening of capitalist rule.
While divisions, and confusion grow among the ranks of its old supporters, the ruling class has no certainty of winning new support from those whom its constitutional schemes are intended to win.
Botha’s proposals offer the Coloured and Indian minorities’ two chambers in a three-chamber parliament with diluted powers and a built-in white majority. They would not even have the right to repeal the Group Areas Act or other laws that oppress them.
These ‘racial’ parliaments are intended as an enticement to middle class leaders of the Coloured and Indian minorities to abandon the struggle for democracy and join in the defence of capitalism and the national oppression of the African majority.
The pressures of the mass movement upon such Coloured and Indian politicians make them cautious about participating in Botha’s scheme (although they have taken part in even more powerless bodies like the CRC and SAIC in the past).
They can see that, particularly as the regime provides no place for African middle class leaders except the travesty of the Bantustans, the new scheme will have only a limited life before it is overtaken by events.
But the Botha government has staked its credibility on these proposals and in the course of the next year or two will be bound to try to carry them through. Its ability to do so will depend on the ability of the apartheid dictatorship to suppress the struggles of the working people.
To offer new enticements, and urged on by the capitalist press and the white opposition PFP leaders, Botha maintains that the country is “at the start of a long constitutional process which will not be completed in one generation”.[3]
Already the advance guard of the ruling class are cooking-up other forms of constitutional juggling – all of them based on new methods of dividing the African people in order to deny them the rightful majority in democratic government.
Echoing Botha, pointing-out the need to work out a constitutional solution through long-term negotiation, Oppenheimer states that the existence of the Bantustans must be accepted and accommodated within a federal system. ‘Federalism’ is also the policy of the PFP.
Pro-capitalist middle class black politicians like Gatsha Buthelezi, Oscar Dhlomo and Bishop Tutu call on the regime to initiate ‘real’ reform.
Tutu declares that, by including African leaders in his scheme, Botha could become a “great” man.
Buthelezi states that a “start could be made on solving the problems of SA if the government provided machinery for blacks to sit on the President’s Council”.[4] He has also said that “in spite of our commitment to one man one vote we are prepared to start negotiating even on the basis of the Buthelezi Commission”.[5]
These statements show the readiness of these so-called ‘democrats’ to compromise the struggle for democracy, provided only that they are given desks in the offices of capitalist power.
The Buthelezi Commission – which the PFP is urging the government to take seriously – bases itself on the continued fragmentation of SA into a patchwork of divided communities. It claims that these communities would be defined on a “voluntary” (!?) basis, rather than that of enforced racial division. Yet underlying its actual proposals is the entrenchment of ethnic division and the continued division of the country into rich white and poor black areas.
It claims to stand for the maximum decentralisation of power of self-government to such local communities. But in fact all the key decisions would remain in the hands of the central government, presiding over the armed forces of repression, continuing to defend the wealth and power of the capitalist class.
Governments would be coalitions of (racial) ‘group representatives’, handpicked by a strong Prime Minister/President – with powers little different from Botha’s proposed Executive President. And at the same time the Buthelezi Commission, with its eyes on the whites, calls for minorities to have more than their proportional share of positions in the bureaucracy and allocation of public funds – as well as rights to veto legislation.
These proposals show that even the ‘liberal’ wing of the SA capitalist class and their black collaborators admit that the defence of their system depends on implacable opposition to majority rule, and the defence of white political privilege.
If the Botha government at present rejects these proposals, it is for two main reasons. On the one hand, it recognises that conceding even the tiniest voice to the African majority in a central parliament – however numerically unrepresentative – would be a signal to the mass movement that the old system is cracking apart. This would vastly accelerate the struggle for majority rule.
On the other hand, such concessions would accompany them, would be likely to heighten confusion, division, and even panic among the whites, providing a more fertile soil for the racist demagogues of the ultra-right.
Yet even now, in measures like the new Black Community Development Act – supported by the PFP – the Botha government is already preparing the ground for further steps to divide and hold back the mass movement against the mass eruptions which are inevitably coming.
Buying Time
But all this constitutional juggling can do no more than buy the ruling class a little time against the revolutionary confrontations looming just over the horizon. The inability of capitalism to satisfy our needs will drive more and more of the working people into the struggle for national and social liberation.
The only force able to carry this struggle to its conclusion, by taking over the banks, mines, factories and big farms, is the organised working class, armed with an understanding of its tasks, drawing to it all the oppressed.
In SA and internationally, the balance of forces overwhelmingly favours the oppressed and exploited, stronger in numbers and more self-confident than ever before. History is on our side.
But our victory depends on our strength of organisation and the clarity of our programme, able to overcome every obstacle which will stand in our way.
As the crisis deepens in SA, it is more and more the vicious capitalist dictatorship which will present itself as the central obstacle. Confronted by dilemmas which it is incapable of solving, the ruling class will grow increasingly divided.
With increasing turmoil among the whites, and a tiny black middle class flung to and fro on the waves of the mass movement, the policies of governments can swing between wider and wider poles.
On the one hand, the mounting revolutionary pressures will impel the search for reform. In its futile search for a new basis for support to hold back the mass movement, the ruling class may well try to ensnare even the leaders of the ANC in negotiations for a ‘settlement’. Their most perceptive strategists already see that this will be necessary.
This is why it is vital that the ANC leadership should clearly recognise that capitalism is the enemy of the people, and that it is impossible to negotiate a genuinely democratic SA with the capitalist class.
Every revolution contains within itself also the prospect of counter-revolution. Stored-up in the ranks of the SA whites is a virulent potential for reaction – if they are presented with no secure alternative for themselves and their children. As Botha said recently to his white supporters, “everybody has a little of the HNP deep in his heart”.
A real alternative for the whites does not exist under capitalism. As for the black majority, so for the whites, a secure future is possible only under workers’ democratic rule.
Workers’ Control
Removing the chains imposed by the profit system would allow a vast expansion in the production of what is needed by working people. A planned economy under workers’ control and management would eliminate all privilege while providing homes, jobs, education, health and cultural facilities for all.
The ruling class fears above all else the workers’ democratic movement which is beginning to develop in the workplaces and the townships. This movement carries the seeds of the democratic socialist SA of the future.
The task is to strengthen this movement.
By building the trade unions and the ANC on a programme for national liberation, democracy, and socialism, we can ensure that our leaders do not submit to any pressures of the capitalist class to enter into the defence of their system.
A socialist movement could rally not only all the oppressed but draw in also those among the whites who are prepared to break decisively with race and class privilege. First in the ones and twos, and later in larger numbers, white workers can come to see that there is no possibility of a secure life in defending a rotten capitalist system.
Under the leadership of the working class in the trade unions and the ANC, a movement built on this basis to embrace millions can smash the monstrous dictatorship which has enslaved the majority for generations.
Against all the constitutional schemes of the ruling class, we must organise firmly around the demand for one person, one vote in an undivided SA!
Once we clearly link this to the socialist transformation of SA, the road will lie open to ending the poverty, division, insecurity and dictatorship which is all that the capitalist class can offer.
© Transcribed from the original by the Marxist Workers Party (2021).
[1] Star, 12 August 1982
[2] Star, 24 August 1982
[3] Sunday Times, 5 September 1982
[4] Star, 27 November 1982
[5] Rand Daily Mail, 16 October 1982