9 The New Radicals

Class conflict abated during the war. Full employment, a rise in profits, and patriotic sentiment generated goodwill on both sides. Government and employers discovered that trade unions could contribute much to industrial peace and efficiency. The union leaders responded with a policy of avoiding action that might reduce output. Trade unionism recovered from the set back suffered after the abortive general strike of 1914 and the resulting large-scale victimizations. The Transvaal Federation of Trades, in a bid to repair the damage and overcome weaknesses disclosed by the strike, changed its name to the South African Industrial Federation and invited the affiliation of unions throughout the country. Only the Cape Federation of Trade Unions held aloof. Established in 1913, it proclaimed a willing ness to organize and admit all workers without regard to race, colour or creed. Some of its affiliated unions, notably in the printing, furniture, baking and building trades, consisted mainly of Coloured members. Bob Stuart, the Cape Federation's secretary and a stubborn Scot, refused to play second fiddle to the north and rejected its white labour policy. The SAIF was the major trade union centre and developed into a powerful organization under the leadership of another Scot, the former radical Archie Crawford.

Deported in 1914, Crawford returned a changed man. His metamorphosis from an extreme radical to a right-wing bureau crat paralleled that of Bill Andrews in the opposite direction.

They interchanged their roles. Andrews, now an uncompromis ing revolutionary, would accuse Crawford, in more elegant language, of the crimes against the working class of which Crawford had accused Andrews in the earlier period. It has been suggested that Crawford when in exile was persuaded by British

187

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-r95o

trade unionists to adopt a policy of class collaboration.' He was not one to be influenced easily against his basic inclinations.

It is more likely that he found an outlet for his ambition in an important office of the kind to which he had aspired without success in the days of his youthful militancy. Not satisfied with building the

^{S AI F}

into a big organization, he wanted the entire trade union movement to turn around him. The war gave him an opportunity to obtain

by

means of diplomacy and conciliation the kind of power that he had failed to achieve through bluster and appeals for mass action.

His favoured technique was to form reference boards which enabled him to negotiate on behalf of the unions affiliated to the

S A IF.

He and Gemmill, the secretary of the Chamber of Mines, settled nearly all white labour disputes on the mines in this way during the war years.

²

The owners showed their goodwill

by

collecting trade union dues under a stop order system; while the unions reciprocated in September 1916

by

agreeing to freeze wage rates for the duration of the war and three months there after. This, said Andrews and his associates in the

IS L,

amounted to a vicious collaboration that stemmed from the basic error of support for the war. The unions were seeking favours from their masters, who 'packed them off as cannon fodder, this probably being the final destination of Trade Unionism

by

Craft and

Crawfordism'. ³

African miners received neither favours from the owners nor aid from the white workers. When whites employed at Van Ryn Deep mine came to work on

²¹

December

1915,

they were told to return home as the entire morning shift of 2,80o Africans had struck work in protest against an unsympathetic compound manager and to redress the grievances of drillers. The latter were kept so long at 'lashing' (removing rock dislodged from the face

by

the previous blast) that they could not drill the minimum norm of thirty-six inches and so were given 'loafer' tickets. Unable to obtain satisfaction, a party of strikers set off

along the Main Reef Road to interview officials of the Native Recruiting Corporation in Johannesburg. A posse of mounted police intercepted them and forced them back to the compound.

The strike ended when the management agreed, under pressure

188

The New Radicals

of government officials, to assure the men that 'their legitimate

grievances would be redressed'." International socialists did not

fail to draw the contrast between African militancy and the passivity of white workers.

Jones and Bunting, the League's leading theorists, gave two broad reasons. The Labour party, they said, had erred by making votes its main target, only to find that it could not match the jingoism of the Unionists in a khaki election.

⁵

More basically the workers had been corrupted by racialism. 'Slaves to a higher oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves in turn batten on a lower slave class.' They compensated for their inferior class status by lording it over Africans. More intolerant than any other working class, the whites were also more para sitical. Appeals to international unity could never evoke a sincere response from a rank-and-file so situated.

⁶

The war was being waged in the name of freedom, and to get it they had to give it. The fact had to be faced that the freedom for which they fought was a mere name to an overwhelming army of native wage labourers who were spat on and spurned by the great majority of their white fellow workers.

⁷

Vote-catching had ruined the movement, agreed Jimmy Bain, who had preceded Crawford as secretary of the

SAIF.

The comment appeared in an obituary on Tom Mathews, a victim of the miners" white scourge' in March

1915.

His last words were:

'I have served the Labour movement faithfully these twenty one years. I hope it is satisfied.' Few men had done more for the workers than Mathews, wrote Bain, and few had received less.

Born at Newlyn, Cornwall, in 1867, he migrated to the United States at the age of fifteen, rose to be president of the miners' union in Montana, and was elected in

1892

to the state house of representatives as Labour's only member. He came to the Rand in 1897, took a prominent part in the miners' union, and became its general secretary in

1907.

'Strong as a lion' and 'fearless of speech', he was more of a socialist than a Labour party man, according to Bain. He helped to found the movement 'before votes were counted of so much importance; before there were places and preferment, Provincial Councils and all other soul stifling influences of today, at work'.8 Mathews was succeeded

189

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-z ^95o

by

another militant, the Australian-born

J.

Forrester Brown, a

founding member of the ISL and an advocate of inter-racial working-class solidarity. He too succumbed like Mathews to what Bain described as 'the narrow-mindedness of his own class'.

Brown, Andrews and other prominent trade unionists in the ISL were unable to detach themselves wholly from the white power structure; and had no intention of following the socialists of Durban and Cape Town into the isolation of a debating society.

The League made a bid for leadership by taking part in elections at every opportunity. It nominated nine candidates in the Trans vaal municipal elections of October 1915. Two, Colin Wade at Germiston and J. A. Clark in Johannesburg, were elected. J. van Lingen represented the League later in the year in a provincial council by-election and came at the bottom of the poll with 138 votes. He won a municipal seat in Germiston in October 1916, while all other League candidates were defeated. This was hardly surprising, as they fought under the slogans of 'No Conscrip

tion' and 'Away with Capitalist War and Capitalist Robbery'.

The League claimed that the result was all a revolutionary party could desire.⁹ Some 2,ooo electors in Johannesburg, Germiston and Benoni had endorsed the revolutionary call to the workers.

Colin Wade contested Troyeville, Johannesburg, at a parlia mentary by-election in January ¹⁹¹⁷ and polled thirty-two votes against Creswell's 8oo. The League's election manifesto de nounced the war as a quarrel between national groups of bosses;

it had nothing to do with workers, who were propertyless and therefore without a country to defend. Creswell's white labour policy was a fraud, since Africans were there to stay at the com mand of their capitalist rulers. The workers' salvation lay in industrial unionism. This would enable them to capture power and lead humanity out of chaos.¹" Andrews and Bunting stood on a similar platform in the provincial council elections in June, with the added incentive of Russia's February revolution. They called on workers to emulate this example and 'claim domination of all the countries of the earth'. The final struggle for socialism had begun. If elected, the League's candidates would strive only for the downfall of capitalism and for industrial democracy.¹'

go

The New Radicals

The mob broke up the League's meetings on May Day, the miners'

union asked Forrester Brown not to speak on the League's platform, and both candidates lost their deposits. Bunting polled seventy-one votes in Commissioner Street, and Andrews, 'the foremost working-class name in South African politics', ob tained

355

votes

in

Benoni.1

²

This series of defeats spread a mood of pessimism about the value of election campaigns. Like the anti-political faction among

Crawford's socialists in 1910, some members of the League

argued that 'vote hunting' reduced them to the level of the reactionary parties in the public's estimation. Moreover, the election of workers to office was futile unless they were backed by economic power.

¹³

'Now is the time to run up the Industrial banner,' urged John Campbell. 'Now is the time to throw all academic discussions and abstractions to the winds and to rally the workers to Industrial Unity by immediate action."

⁴

A joint meeting of branches on the Rand accordingly decided in October

1917

that the League would not nominate candidates for the coming municipal election.'

⁵

De Leon's concept of industrial unionism, which would obliterate craft and colour divisions, appeared to be the proper alternative to fruitless electioneering and the dead-end campaign against the war. The organization of all workers for industrial action, declared the executive com mittee, was the great revolutionary fruit of an otherwise pointless

agitation.' ⁶

Workers who rejected the League's candidates and its anti

war policy could not be expected to embark on revolutionary

strikes. Like every radical party which has exhausted the possi

bilities of parliamentary struggle, the League was forced to

recognize that only the voteless majority would respond posi

tively to appeals for far-reaching social changes. To be taken

seriously as a contestant for power, it could trim its sails to suit

the electorate and compete with the Labour party in defence of

white supremacy, or it could attempt to acquire a mass base

among the oppressed. The decision to take the second course

marks the great divide in the development of the labour move

ment. From this emerged a genuine radicalism, which accepted

the consequent identification with Africans, Coloured and

'9'

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o

Indians in a struggle outside the bounds of constitutional politics.

The International Socialists made their greatest contribu tion not by protesting against the war, but in spreading the vision of a single integrated society embracing all South Africans with out distinctions of class or colour.

The vision grew out of the protest. It was the failure of the mission against militarism that led to a critical appraisal of claims to racial privilege. The League, wrote Jones after the defeat in Troyeville, could not hope for a large backing among the Labour party's constituents, the small shopkeeper and artisan.

It was poised like Mohammed's coffin between the two economic bases of craft workers and the propertyless proletariat, who happened to be black and were therefore disfranchised and despised. If the League was not to be Utopian, it would have to develop their consciousness as a great emancipating and emanci pated class. International socialism 'is nothing if not a virile propaganda to awaken the native wage earner, and with the native his white prototype, to a consciousness of his great mis

' 17

sion of human reclamation .

The socialists reached this point slowly and with misgivings during two and a half years of increasing isolation. They had broken away from the Labour party to fight militarism, and not the colour bar; and they could not easily rid themselves of a belief in white supremacy. One advantage of the withdrawal, they claimed, was that it gave them 'untrammelled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinat ing problem of the native'.

¹⁸

He was a problem, and not a comrade at this stage. They could not hope to free the white, they said, until they had freed the native. The possibility that the African would free himself did not then occur to them. He was not mentioned in their original statement of aims, or in their appeals for socialist unity against militarism. When the Durban

SDP

replied that unity would be prejudiced by adherence to a white labour policy, the League evaded the challenge. The socialists were hitting the enemy where it hurt most, and would yet find time to clarify their attitude to 'such important matters as the Coloured and Native question'19

The League's first annual conference in January 1916 defined

192

an attitude to Africans in a resolution based on Bunting's 'petition of rights'. It called for the abolition of indentured labour, compounds and pass laws in the interests of working class emancipation; and urged 'the lifting of the Native worker to the political and industrial status of the white'. Dunbar put up the familiar pseudo-radical argument that there was not a 'native question'; only a worker's problem. Colin Wade suggested that Africans were 'biologically inferior'. Conference rejected both views, and made a concession to racism by adopting a modified version of the Labour party's segregation policy. The number of Africans employed in industry should not be increased until they had been elevated to the white man's status. Meanwhile, those in employment would be assisted to free themselves from the wage system - presumably by keeping them off the labour market. This approach represented no advance on the position taken up by radicals in ^1912. The League was still paternalistic, a group of missionary socialists intent on bringing enlightenment to the darker brethren for their own sake, but primarily to save the white proletariat from itself.

The League from then on gave increasing attention to African disabilities and aspirations. The Johannesburg central branch made 'native affairs' a feature of its lecture syllabus. Africans were invited to the League's public meetings. Saul Msane of the Transvaal Native Congress listened with other Africans to the Rev. Father Hill of the Community of the Resurrection when he denounced the Natives Land Act as a barefaced attempt to force peasants into the labour market. The International hailed this as 'the first Labour or Socialist meeting with natives in the audience'.²⁰ It was, indeed, a notable stage in the education of the Rand's socialists, who could not reshape their ideas until they associated with Africans on equal terms. The League pro vided the opportunity, but clung to the remnant of the old segregation myth. A leading article in the International of 17 March 1916 blamed capitalism for breaking down the 'ethno logical tendency' to a'natural social apartness of white and black'.

The system compelled white workers to recognize the African 'as perforce a permanent fellow worker'. They needed his industrial cooperation to destroy capitalism. This done, the

C.S.A.-9 '93

Class and Colour in South Africa z850-1950

'natural tendency' could be allowed free play. The conclusion that Africans, having made the revolution, would then tolerate apartheid was as absurd as any reached

by

Crawford's socialists.

The discussions revealed no more than a growing awareness of the African's role. It was marginal to the League's main aim of soliciting votes and preaching international solidarity against militarism. The socialists were inspired less

by

exhortations to

combine with Africans than

by

the strike of Cape Town's tramwaymen in May

1916,

or

by

the prosecution of Wilfrid Harrison, 'the most policed and summonsed anti-militarist in

South Africa', for distributing a melodramatic protest against the horrors of war.

²¹

Such events were symptoms of the class struggle, whereas the extent of the African's participation seemed problematical. George Mason found it necessary to urge an audience of League members and Africans in the Johannesburg Trades Hall to rid themselves of the stale nonsense purveyed in the movement about the African's mental capacity. Any man good enough for capitalist production was doubly so for labour organization. Since white workers were bribed to keep the African down, it was a waste of time to argue against their prejudices. The League should concentrate instead on helping intelligent Africans to organize their people. This admonition evoked no more than the derisive comment that 'George was a kind of Bobby Burns who allowed his dominant sense of kin ship with the Universal Human to warp his judgement as to

degrees of mental capacity'.22

The socialists denied racial prejudice and claimed to be guided only

by

good intentions.

All

they wanted was to protect a docile and ignorant people from exploitation. Africans would be ex cluded from government even under socialism until they reached maturity. Mixed marriages were objectionable not on account

of.

colour differences, but because

of the immaturity of the blacks. One

correspondent

of

the

International

would repudiate socialism if it required him to have tea with Charlie, Jim or Sixpence. The editor replied that socialism did not mean mixed marriages: 'as to the evils

of this both whites and natives largely agree'. As for

segregation, only the combined pressure

of

all workers would compel the capitalist to dispense with the best part of his work

194

The New Radicals

ing force. 'The

way to healthy social segregation is through Industrial Cooperation.'

It alone would civilize the 'Kaffir wage earners' and purify the atmosphere. A labour movement that failed to organize and educate the unskilled was by that fact a movement of only a part of labour and would surely sacrifice the rest.

²³

Logic led to the further conclusion that socialism could not be attained without the African's assistance. Only he could save himself and in so doing save the white society. The argument was repeated often, with an assurance that a growing number of white workers were grasping the point. This was a delusion.

Socialists applauded Msane for saying that the important thing was to educate the whites. Africans would join trade unions, which had been formed to fight them, he said, if the barriers were lifted.

²⁴

The socialists also needed education, however. Their emotions had not yet fused with reason to produce the passionate conviction that provides the driving force behind a genuine radicalism. They condemned the colour bar because it retarded the growth of class consciousness, not because it was an evil in itself. This was the fundamental flaw in their approach. It blinded them to the nature of the African's problems, and to the quality of his resistance to race discrimination.

The League's theory belittled the importance of social divi sions other than class, and the value of combinations other than industrial. Nationalism, both African and Afrikaner, was said to be the nostalgic yearning of small proprietors for a vanishing era, or a false patriotism that blunted class consciousness. Afri cans and Afrikaners would turn their backs on nationalism when capitalist production forced them to work for a wage. Class divisions, said Andrews, cut across the colour line. Rich natives combined with rich whites to exploit the masses. The assertion suited his theory, and not the facts. He and other socialists dis trusted educated leaders like Jabavu, Abdurahman and Grendon, the editor of

Abantu Batho,

the African National Congress's newspaper. Such men expressed loyalty to Britain, support for the war, and 'old-fashioned bookish aspirations for the vote as the be-all and end-all'. Wrongly described as a 'bourgeoisie', the intellectuals, lawyers and parsons of the national liberation

195

In document Workers and the Vote 98 (Page 185-199)