How workers brought down apartheid in South Africa

Apartheid South Africa was a brutal white supremacist society.

The racism of colonialism stretched back to 1652, when the Dutch East India Company settled in the Cape. The discovery of gold in the late 1800s entrenched it as the means to exploit the African population as a cheap working class.

After the election of the National Party in 1948, it was formalised as apartheid, a particularly pernicious system in which the Black population was discriminated against in the most horrendous ways.

One example I witnessed while in South Africa in 1992 illustrates what it was like.

We attended a protest in Khayelitsha, a poverty-stricken township in the sand hills behind the picturesque city of Cape Town where whites lived. We were invited into a couple of homes, which were built of corrugated iron, scraps of board (whatever could be scrounged), with an earthen floor and only an open fireplace for cooking.

One day we went to see a white suburb in Johannesburg.

The only faces we saw all day were Black. They did all the work—gardening, child care, cleaning—in palatial homes surrounded by razor wire with guard dogs at the ready. The bleak irony of this was summed up by Alex LaGuma, an anti-apartheid author, as “unlaughing laughter”. In the afternoon there was a great exodus as the workers went home to the townships where they lived in degrading poverty.

The dominant narrative of how apartheid was destroyed is that told by the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP). In that narrative, they stand at the head of a mass movement like the stars of an opera supported by a chorus.

The account told here is not a definitive history of the anti-apartheid struggle. But it is told in the framework of a revolutionary socialist perspective, bringing the movement—one of the most inspiring and impressive of the twentieth century—front and centre.

By the mid-1980s, the Black working class, backed up by township revolts and youth rebellions, brought South Africa to the brink of revolution. There was every possibility they could overthrow not just the racist laws, but capitalism itself.

Tragically, the politics of the ANC, its close ally the SACP and others we will meet, ensured that the ruling class managed a transition to Black capitalism. Accordingly, poverty and injustice continue to this day.

The anti-apartheid struggle began in the early twentieth century. But the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960 was an important turning point. The Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) had organised a peaceful protest of about 7,000 against the hated pass laws, which controlled the movement of Black citizens.

Police killed 69 and wounded at least another 180. Following the massacre, ongoing ferocious violence was unleashed by the state, and the ANC and PAC were banned (the SACP had been illegal since 1950). Totalitarian legislation gave almost unlimited powers to police. Thousands were jailed—many for life. Others were executed.

For ten years, repressive labour laws meant that strikes were virtually unheard of. Many activists fled into exile. Sharpeville marked the end of what had been an upward trajectory of struggle.

It was also a political turning point for activists such as Nelson Mandela, who concluded that the policy of non-violence was useless in the face of such brutality. Mandela, along with Walter Sisulu, leader of the SACP, established an armed militia, uMkhonto we Sizwe (The Spear of the Nation, known as MK), in December 1961.

A guerrilla struggle could not bring down such a powerful, rapidly industrialising state. Nevertheless, it was a source of immense pride for the masses battling the brutality of the army and police. Toyi-toying, modelled on the jogging by the armed militias in their training, was thereafter a feature of protests.

Mandela and Sisulu, plus another six, were handed long prison sentences for things like blowing up infrastructure.

Liberal historians have redrawn the popular image of Mandela, who would be elected as president in 1994. This organiser of uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC, is recast as a non-violent activist.

How could respectable circles embrace a terrorist as president of a powerful industrial state? More importantly, how preferable that the oppressed have a non-violent hero than an organiser of armed militias.

The draconian security apparatus following Sharpeville underpinned social stability and an economic boom from 1963 to 1972. Justified with anti-communist rhetoric, it was greatly admired by Western governments. Western capitalists drank like pigs at the trough of obscene wealth, lapping up one of the world’s highest rates of return on investments.

But every capitalist state has inbuilt contradictions. As Marx argued, capitalism creates its own gravediggers: the working class. New industries created an inexorable movement of Black workers into and around the cities despite the pass laws.

And demoralisation after defeat never lasts forever.

In 1973, a strike wave in the coastal city Durban transformed the situation. Dock workers were critical, with the economic power they could wield by holding up trade. Textile workers also played a key role. Picketing was illegal, but their marches around the streets were, if anything, more effective, drawing workers from other factories into the struggle. Discussions in the streets, on the buses, trams and hostels forged informal links between workers.

Durban was soon under a virtual general strike. In an attempt to restore order, on 9 February workers were offered a 15 percent pay rise. By the end of March, about 100,000—approximately half of the entire Black workforce in Durban—were out on strike.

The new industries created by the economic boom drew in many new workers, including women. They joined the unions in huge numbers, bringing a fresh spirit of militant rebellion.

The strikes struck fear into the hearts of many white employers. Many companies resorted to repression, sacking militants. A government minister declared, “I want to bleed the trade unions to death”.

On the other side, a white woman trade union organiser made an insightful, important point. She argued that pay rises they’d won weren’t the most important thing, but “the consciousness workers have developed is the most important because it can’t be taken back. It can’t be cancelled”.

Between January and June 1974, 300 strikes involved 80,000 workers. Miners’ strikes ended in riots as police tried to bludgeon workers back underground. In just one, 132 were killed and 500 wounded.

Activists who identified as socialists, known as the “Workerists”, played a crucial role in Durban and the East Cape. They did some excellent work, establishing elected shop stewards in factories who played a leading role in building new, strong and democratic unions.

These unions laid the basis for the formation of the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in 1979, with 45,000 members from twelve unions. These unions were the most left wing of all South African organisations for years to come.

Students played an important role in the struggle.

On 16 June 1976, 15,000 students gathered in the township of Soweto, which sits near the mining belt south of the capital Johannesburg. So the students had known poverty and repression all their lives. The government’s order that classes be conducted in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors, was the spark that lit a tinderbox of anger. A heart-rending photo of 12-year-old Hector Pietersen—the first student killed by police firing live ammunition at peaceful protesters—sent shock waves around the world.

Campuses had been shaken up by protests initiated by the fledgling Black Consciousness Movement since 1972. Students had been expelled, banned and imprisoned. The strikes of 1973-74 inspired the restless students, and the deadly state violence against the miners’ strikes enraged them.

The slogan of students became: “Dialogue, no! Confrontation, yes! Yes! Yes!”.

After the first morning of the Soweto uprising, the police imposed a reign of terror, shooting people at random. Bodies piled high on trucks were taken away with no record of names.

Students across the country organised township revolts, taking to the streets and bringing more people, including their parents, into the struggle. This was a new high point in the anti-apartheid movement.

But unfortunately, there were serious weaknesses in the politics of the Black Consciousness Movement, which led the initial uprising. Their vision was of Black unity between all classes against the white regime. They had no conception of Black workers organising independently of the middle classes represented by the conservative ANC. While more militant, they offered no political alternative.

In the 1980s, all the contradictions of the system intensified. With growing industrialisation, bosses needed more skilled workers, but apartheid’s restriction of those jobs to whites created labour shortages. The economy was stagnating.

Black unions grew. In 1981-82, the metal industry in the East Rand was hit with growing militancy. The Workerist-led Metal and Allied Workers Union trebled in 1981, then doubled its membership again in 1982. The National Union of Miners gained legal status in 1982 and staged its first ever legal strike in 1984.

The car industry in the Eastern Cape and the textile industry of Natal met not just struggles over working conditions, but increasingly political demands. When a union organiser was murdered in February 1982, 101,000 struck. The Transvaal, the industrial heartland of the economy, had up to 800,000 on strike at one stage.

The emergence of this powerful Black working-class movement was of world-historic importance. And the world’s capitalists new it threatened their control and the massive profits apartheid made possible.

In 1985, the editor of an Afrikaans newspaper met with ANC representatives in Harare. In September 1985, the chairman of Anglo American, the largest finance house in South Africa, met with ANC representatives in Lusaka. A conference at the Ford Foundation in New York in 1986 included the chairman of the reactionary Afrikaner-Broederbond along with several top ANC leaders.

At the same time, the movement was divided by the political questions it was forced to face.

The main division was between the Workerists (the activists who had established FOSATU), and the Populists (supporters of the ANC and SACP).

Mandela always stressed that the ANC’s Freedom Charter did not support socialism. The SACP introduced confusion. They argued that apartheid was not real capitalism, so workers needed to subordinate their demands and power to the middle-class radicals of the ANC and keep the few capitalists supporting reforms onside. Once apartheid ended, then they could fight for socialism (which was later exposed as the despicable lie it always was).

The Workerists, influential in unions of metals and manufacturing, clothing, textiles and retail workers, correctly argued that Black capitalism would continue the exploitation and oppression of Black workers, so capitalism needed to be overthrown and replaced with socialism.

Leon Trotsky outlined his Theory of Permanent Revolution in Russia before the 1917 revolution, which was relevant for South Africa in the 1980s. Workers, rather than holding back to keep the pro-capitalist middle class on side, needed to lead the national struggle. With their power, and the democratic organisations they create, they could carry it forward to a socialist revolution.

Huge May Day rallies in 1985 signalled that momentum was building. Union leaders successfully negotiated the formation of a new peak union body, COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, established in December 1985. It included 34 unions representing more than a million members. Significantly, it included the incredibly strong and militant miners, under SACP leadership.

At first, COSATU kept its distance from the ANC’s populist United Democratic Front. But the left underestimated the political pull of the ANC with its backing from newly independent African states.

The syndicalist orientation of the Workerists simply could not defeat them. They relied on strong, militant, democratically structured trade unions. But they never cohered a layer of the most class-conscious worker militants along with student activists and people in the townships into a revolutionary party.

That party was needed to argue coherently that the struggles in workplaces, schools and townships must unite under the leadership of the working class—the only force with the power to overthrow not just apartheid, but capitalism.

In 1986, one million marched in May Day protests. The government unleashed ferocious repression in an attempt to break the movement once and for all.

In the Eastern Cape, virtually every factory had workers jailed, some for three years. In northern Natal, every organiser and many key shop stewards were jailed. Everywhere, COSATU officials were targeted. At some factories, the whole workforce was sacked and many jailed.

Moses Mayekiso, a popular Workerist leader, was charged with treason. The ANC and SACP refused to defend him.

Thousands were persecuted. States of emergency made little impact. In 1987, mineworkers walked out in the biggest strike ever—around 27,000 activists were arrested.

Some employers began urging the police to back off, calling for recognition of bona fide unions. The level of struggle was impeding the orderly creation of profits.

In the midst of this heroic high point of resistance, the Populists won a significant victory. In July 1987, COSATU, in which socialists had played a big role, signed the anti-socialist Freedom Charter.

This enabled the ANC to consolidate its authority as the sole representative organisation of the Black masses and fostered disarray among its opponents.

Workerist intellectuals capitulated. Having previously opposed any alliance of the unions with the Populists, now they argued such unity was the only way forward. Instead of socialism, they advocated for a radical, capitalist democracy as the only feasible goal.

There were unions like the retail workers in which support for the Charter was strongly resisted. But the tide had turned.

Nevertheless, the militancy and anger continued, terrifying international investors. English capitalists began urging the government to cede reforms.

This process held huge dangers for the ruling class, as reforms might boost the movement. But the ANC, the SACP and many intellectuals backed this process aimed at saving capitalism. Even former socialists and syndicalists gave way and threw in their lot with the Populist hope of power in a new, Black, capitalism.

By 1989, South Africa was in total crisis. By 4 August, there were 4 million on strike.

President de Klerk announced that Mandela would walk free. The ANC and SACP were made legal.

On 11 February 1990, Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison after 27 years of incarceration, the first 18 spent on the hellish Robben Island. It was an emotional sight, even for those of us who understood that he was being released to help save capitalism.

The refusal by him and the others to condemn the use of violence in the fight for freedom earned them enormous authority. Now that prestige in the eyes of the Black population would be employed to the advantage of their exploiters. Mandela had engaged in secret negotiations with the white regime while in jail.

While the ANC were negotiating with the white oppressors of the Black masses, the struggle continued.

Every day of the week I spent in Johannesburg in 1992, we would walk into the CBD. If we didn’t have details of the day’s union march, we’d listen for chanting and find it. One day we marched with the students, surrounded by horrible tank-like vehicles used to carry armed police.

The students proceeded to burn a South African flag. As the troops began to spill out of their tanks, rifles at the ready, workers all up and down a nearby building site stopped work, chanting solidarity messages. The troops dared not open fire. Everyone knew this was an incendiary moment in history.

We attended a funeral for those massacred at Boipatong, outside Johannesburg, one of many such massacres by right-wing Black militias backed up by security forces. Pandemonium ruled. Tens of thousands were determined to get to Sharpeville for the funeral. A convoy of cars and buses took over both sides of a main, double highway. The joy of defying cops not permitted to shoot us down was electric.

An incident sums up something of the situation. The cops were complaining to the organisers that there were too many weapons in the buses. So a deal was done to ensure they let the cavalcade proceed. Chris Hani, one of the most loved leaders of the MK guerrillas and general secretary of the SACP, was brought in to find a compromise.

He convinced one bus to hand over one hand grenade (although everyone knew there was a whole cache of arms on board and many more everywhere). The cops had to accept it and let everyone get to Sharpeville.

One year later, Hani was assassinated during an upsurge of far-right mobilisations. The Black masses responded with huge protests and riots.

At that funeral, as guns were firing all around and religious leaders intoned prayers as the martyrs were lowered into their graves, we were still being asked for copies of the socialist magazine we had put away in respect to the proceedings.

Youths of 14-15 years old demanded I explain Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution.

Railway shop stewards in Johannesburg, and others in Cape Town, invited me to intervene in debates about adopting a program of cooperation with bosses and the government pushed by the SACP, like the Hawke Labor government had adopted here. They instinctively made all the arguments against it that we’d made against the Communist Party in Australia.

But revolutionary organisations there and around the world were too small to challenge the ANC successfully.

In the few weeks spent among those workers, I experienced a people who had fought a regime of pure evil and its international backers into submission. But it was all too clear that liberation was not their destiny.

Ronnie Kasril, an SACP member for 50 years, wrote in his autobiography of the corrupting process they were part of:

“To break apartheid through negotiations, rather than a bloody civil war seemed ... an option too good to be ignored.” But he admitted it was a “devil’s pact ... [we were] bequeathed an economy so tied into the neoliberal global formula ... that there is very little room to alleviate the plight of most of our people”.

Former South African president from the ANC Thabo Mbeki said that the Anglo American executives met them in 1985 because they were “sensitive to the depth of the crisis and needed the ANC to get out of it”.

Cyril Ramaphosa, leader of the powerful miners’ union, is now a billionaire and president of the still vicious country.

What a legacy for organisations that, for decades, had claimed they stood for justice for the Black masses!

We honour the Black workers, students and townships. For over seven decades, they fought wave after wave of battles, despite tens of thousands being jailed, tortured, killed and forced into exile.

But we cannot just celebrate their inspiring courage and tenacity; we must draw lessons from their movement.

First, bravery, determination and dedication, while indispensable, are insufficient unless revolutionaries can win workers’ confidence to challenge the capitalist state for power.

Second, violence against a rabid state is necessary at times, or at least is not to be condemned. But it does not answer the political questions which inevitably confront every liberation movement.

Third, the identity politics so popular today could not even begin to understand, let alone defeat, the treachery of the mostly Black ANC. Whether it’s whites or Black people running capitalism, exploitation and oppression remain.

Finally, it took a struggle of revolutionary proportions just to force the white ruling class and its international backers to negotiate a transition that left them with their economic clout and a share in political power. If anyone imagines we can win fundamental change by being moderate, by abiding by rules and laws imposed by the oppressors, they should study this history.

There are always organisations like the ANC and SACP that help save capitalism. They will be defeated only by a revolutionary party imbued with these lessons.

The struggle against South African apartheid was one of the most inspiring and impressive movements of the twentieth century. It is devastatingly tragic that it was denied its goal of genuine freedom.

We must learn from their rich history to truly honour them and ensure their sacrifice was not in vain so that in struggles to come, we can win. Their sacrifice and courage will be vindicated when we begin the process of building a socialist society of human freedom.