Part 1

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1981.

Badrawi, Malak, Political Violence in Egypt 1910–1925, Secret Societies, Plots and Assassinations, Richmond: Curzon, 2000.

Beinin, Joel, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Beinin, Joel and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882–1954. London: I.B. Tauris, 1988.

Bettini, Leonardo, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, Florence: Editrice, 2 vols, 1976.

Chalcraft, John T., The Striking Cabbies of Cairo: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863– 1914, Albany NY: State University of New York, 2005.

Chardak, Henriette, Élisée Reclus, une vie: l’homme qui aimait la terre, Paris: Stock, 1997.

Cole, Juan, Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East, Princeton UP, 1993.

Dizionario Biografico degli Anarchici Italiani, Antonioli, M et al. (eds), Franco Serantini: Pisa, vol. 1, 2003.

Falco, Emilio, Armando Borghi e gli anarchici italiani 1900–1922, Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1992.

Fedeli, Ugo, Luigi Galleani, Quarant’anni di lotte rivoluzione (1891–1931), Cesena: L’Antistato, 1956.

Gorman, Anthony, “Anarchists in Education: The Free Popular University in Egypt (1901)”, Middle Eastern Studies 41 no. 3 (2005) 303–320.

——, “Foreign Workers in Egypt 1882–1914: Subaltern or labor elite?”, pp. 237–260 in Stephanie Cronin (ed.), Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa, London and New York: Routledge, 2008.

——, Historians, State and Politics in Twentieth Century Egypt: Contesting the Nation. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Guillaume, James, L’Internationale, Documents et Souvenirs, 1864–1878, 2 vols, Gerard Lebovici: Paris, 1985.

Ismael, Tareq Y. and Rifa’at El-Sa’id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920–1988. Syracuse University Press. 1990.

‘Izz al-Din, Amin, al-Tabaqa al-‘amila al-misriyya mundhu nashatiha hatta thawrat 1919, Cairo: Dar al-sha‘b, 1967.

Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, ‘Levantine Trajectories: The Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria, 1860–1914’, Ph.D. dis., Harvard University, 2003

——, “Theater and Radical Politics in Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria”, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 2006.

Kordatos, Yiannis, Istoria tou Ellinikou Ergatikou Kinimatos, Athens: Boukoumani, 1972.

Lockman, Zachary, “Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914”, Poetics Today 15 (1994) 157–190.

—— (ed.), Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies, State University of New York Press, 1994.

Masini, Pier C., Storia degli anarchici italiana, da Bakunin a Malatesta, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969.

Michel, Ersilio, Esuli Italiani in Egitto (1815–1861), Pisa, 1958.

Molaschi, Carlo, Pietro Gori, Il Pensiero: Milano, 1959.

Musa, Salama, Tarbiyya Salama Musa, Dar al-Mustaqbal, 1958.

Owen, Roger, The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800–1914, Methuen: London and New York, 1981.

Pea, Enrico, La vita in Egitto, Milan: Mondadori, 1949.

Petricioli, Marta Oltre il Mito, L’Egitto degli Italiani (1917–1947), Milan: Mondadori, 2007.

Pernicone, Nunzio, Italian Anarchism 1864–1892, Princeton UP, 1993.

Politis, Athanase G., L’Hellénisme et L’Egypte Moderne, Paris: Félix Alcan, 2 vols., 1929–30. al-Rafi‘i, ‘Abd al-Rahman, Mustafa Kamil, ba‘th al-haraka al-wataniyya. Cairo, 1939.

Reid, Donald M. Cairo University and the Making of Modern Egypt. Cairo: AUC Press, 1991.

——, “Political Assassination in Egypt, 1910–1954”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15: 4, 1982, 625–651.

——, ‘The Syrian Christians and Early Socialism in the Arab World’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 5, 1974, 177–193.

Revolutionary Syndicalism, Communism and the National Question in South African Socialism, 1886–1928

Lucien van der Walt
University of the Witwatersrand

This chapter examines the manner in which anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists confronted the national question in South Africa, particularly during the 1910s, the period of unquestioned syndicalist hegemony on the revolutionary left. The national question has been perhaps the single most important issue facing labor and the left in South Africa. It centers on two main elements: the deep racial and national divisions in the country, and the national oppression of the African, Colored and Indian majority. Both elements were deeply rooted in its colonial history, but also tightly entangled in its modern economy, as will be discussed later.

I argue that the local anarchists and syndicalists maintained a principled opposition to racial discrimination and oppression, and a principled commitment to the creation of a multiracial anti-capitalist, anti-statist movement. These two positions constituted the irreducible core of the libertarians’ approach to the national question—a distinctive approach that differed in critically significant ways from the later, Communist, “national-democratic” approach (of which more below).

However, it is important to distinguish between two key expressions of this approach, which had different tactical and practical implications. The first may be termed abstract-internationalism: this opposed popular prejudice as well as official discrimination, but failed to take a crucial step of combining this principled position with active, and specific, efforts to mobilize African, Colored, and Indian workers around both their class and national grievances. In practice, this approach was identified with a de facto focus on white labor.

The second may be termed the activist-integrationist approach: it developed strategies that moved from analysis and principle to consistent and targeted efforts to mobilize African, Colored, and Indian workers around both class and national issues. It enabled, it will be argued, the construction by 1921 of a genuinely multiracial revolutionary syndicalist movement, organized in a network of newspapers, unions and political groups, firmly committed to uniting the local working class to struggle simultaneously against the specific national oppression of the African, Colored and Indian majority, and the capitalist exploitation and state domination of the whole working class, African, Colored, Indian and white.

Fig. 1. African workers attend a rally in Johannesburg, addressed by members of the Industrial Workers of Africa, the International Socialist League and the South African Native National Congress, June 1918.

The vehicle of this combined struggle was usually envisaged as a revolutionary interracial One Big Union on the model of the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW, or Wobblies): “The key to social regeneration ... to the new Socialist Commonwealth is to be found in the organization of a class conscious proletariat within the Industrial Union”,[217] creating an Industrial Republic “administered ... democratically by the workers themselves”.[218]

The One Big Union was to be the proletarian forge in which a common society embracing all, regardless of color, would be created. The aim of the working class revolution was not to constitute an independent national state. It was to overcome national and class inequality through the working class battle to constitute a self-managed libertarian socialist “Industrial Republic”: this would unite the African, Colored, Indian and white working people, and also form “an integral part of the International Industrial Republic”.[219]

Not only did this vision come to dominate the radical left in the 1910s, but it enabled the anarchists and syndicalists to pioneer multiracial left-wing organization, as well as union work among the African people, to work alongside Colored and African nationalists, and to develop an increasingly sophisticated analysis of—and strategy to resolve—the national question.

While the libertarian movement was pioneered by white immigrant radicals, mainly of British and Jewish origin, the demographic profile of the movement changed radically over time. Thus, the local roll call of anarchists and syndicalist militants includes revolutionary people of color, like Ferd Cetiwe, K.C. Fredericks, Johnny Gomas, Hamilton Kraai, R.K. Moodley, Bernard Sigamoney and T.W. Thibedi, alongside white radicals like W.H. “Bill” Andrews, A.Z. Berman, S.P. Bunting, Andrew Dunbar, Henry Glasse, Wilfred Harrison, H.B. “Barney” Levinson and Ferdinand Marais.

The local syndicalist movement also came to center on a number of IWW-style unions in the major centers, based among people of color. Anticipated by the practice of South African (SA) General Workers’ Union in Cape Town in the first decade of the century (and by the aims of the local IWW formed in 1910), these unions included the Clothing Workers Industrial Union, the Indian Industrial Workers’ Union, the Horse Drivers’ Union, the Industrial Workers’ of Africa, and the Sweet and Jam Workers’ Industrial Union in the 1910s. Together they represented several thousand people, and were among the very first unions among workers of color. Among white workers, the syndicalists had some influence in the Cape Federation of Labor Unions, the shopstewards’ and workers’ committee movement, and the Building Workers Industrial Union (BWIU). Political groups that promoted anarchism and syndicalism included the local Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the International Socialist League (ISL), the (separate) Industrial Socialist League (IndSL), and the Socialist Labor Party (SLP).

In the late 1910s, the local syndicalist movement also had a significant impact on formations like the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, 1912, renamed the African National Congress, or ANC, in 1923), and the African Political Organization (APO, 1902), representing African and Colored nationalist formations, respectively. Into the 1920s, syndicalist influences would continue within the radical wing of white labor (especially the Council of Action of 1920–1922), the early Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, 1921), and the (predominantly African) Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU, 1919), which spread from South Africa into neighboring South West Africa, Northern Rhodesia and Southern Rhodesia).[220]

This analysis and research goes directly counter to the prevailing interpretation of the early history of the left in South Africa, and of its approach to the national question. Scholarship on these issues remains dominated by the interpretations developed by what I term the “Communist school”: writers identified with the CPSA and its underground successor, the South African Communist Party (SACP, f. 1953).

While the Communist school undoubtedly played a key role in pioneering left and labor history in South Africa from the 1940s, it has consistently caricatured the pre-CPSA left. Besides downplaying the achievements of anarchism and syndicalism, it has tended to treat the early left as basically a overwhelmingly white movement that at best viewed “the national oppression of the majority” as “not really very worthy of consideration”[221]—and, at worst, embraced “white supremacy” and a “segregation policy”.[222] This is part of a larger interpretation of history—to which we return below—which treats the CPSA/SACP, and the larger Communist International (Comintern), as the unique repository of a revolutionary, socialist, answer to the national question.

Only recently has the history of anarchism and syndicalism started to be taken more seriously,[223] but there has been little in the way of a serious reappraisal of their engagement with the national question.[224] Such a reappraisal not only has significant implications for the interpretation of labor and left history in South Africa, but also enables the recovery of the impressive history of early black socialist radicalism—ironically, a casualty of the Communist school’s analysis.

Background: the national question, labor and the left

The area that became South Africa comprised a range of distinctive agrarian societies—English, Afrikaner, and African—in the 1860s, when the discovery of diamonds (1867) in Kimberley, followed by gold (1886) on the Witwatersrand (the “Rand” or “Reef ”), precipitated an industrial revolution. Large-scale foreign investment poured in from large European investors seeking new outlets for capital, and by 1913 nearly half the world’s total gold output came from roughly fifty square miles on the Witwatersrand.[225] Less than 15 percent of gold mining shares were held locally in 1913,[226] with mining investments dwarfing all other Western investments in the entire continent.[227] Mining was centralized in a small oligopoly, working closely with state industries and infrastructure: this set the pattern for the industries that followed.

The Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by British imperialism as a self-governing Dominion. It brought together a multiracial, multinational and polyglot population under a single state, but not on equal terms. The Transvaal and Orange Free State—the Afrikaner republics—were conquered in the brutal Anglo-Boer War (1899– 1902), yet were included as provinces alongside Britain’s Cape and Natal colonies. The African polities, such as the Pedi and Zulu kingdoms, which had been conquered in 1879, were included as well, but as subject “Native Reserves”. Following World War I, German South West Africa came under South African trusteeship, but was not formally incorporated.[228]

The majority of the country’s mine workforce was drawn from the defeated African majority of South Africa and the neighboring territories (such as Basutoland, Mozambique,[229] and Northern and Southern Rhodesia). The Africans—the indigenous, black, Bantuspeaking population, or “natives” in colonial parlance—had been subject to accelerating processes of white conquest in the 19^th century, and held no independent territories by the turn of the century. In 1920, barely half (51 percent) of the African miners were drawn from within South Africa itself: 36 percent came from Portuguese Mozambique, and the remainder from other colonial territories.[230] Most were male migrants who lived in closed hostels (“compounds”), later returning to their rural homesteads, a model of controlled migrant labor pioneered on the mines but emulated in other urban industries.[231]

This cheap and nominally unskilled workforce was effectively indentured by rigid contracts, unlike the skilled miners and artisans, who were initially mainly immigrant, often English-speaking, white workers, drawn largely from across the British Empire.[232] Later including a growing number of Afrikaners, they developed into a permanently urbanized, and free, workforce. By 1913, the Witwatersrand mines employed 195,000 Africans (mainly laborers, but also clerks and security guards), and 22,000 white workers.[233] A further 37,000 Africans worked in domestic service, with 6,000 in factories, workshops and warehouses; there were also 16,500 white workers in building, tramways, printing, electricity and other industries, including 4,500 on the state railways.

Besides ongoing African-white conflicts, boiling over into race riots in some of the multiracial Witwatersrand slums, there were also ethnic divisions among the Africans. Compounds were divided on ethnic lines, and there was a degree of occupational segregation underground and a long history of violent inter-ethnic “faction-fights”.[234] There were also divisions between the (largely skilled) white immigrants and the (largely unskilled) local Afrikaners, further complicated by substantial East European Jewish immigration. A third of whites were classified as poor or very poor: most were proletarianized Afrikaners, trekking to the unfamiliar cities to take “orders like black people” and speak the English of the conquering British.[235]

Free workers in general—the whites, the large Indian population of Natal, and the Colored group, mainly in the Cape—were concentrated in the cities, terrified of replacement by each other, as well as by the mass of cheap African labor, concentrated at the very bottom of society. The small urban African population (that is, excluding the mining compounds) outside the mines was around 40,000 in 1909 in Johannesburg, the hub of the Witwatersrand; most were South Africans.[236] It lived in a twilight world: faced with segregation and discrimination, it was at the bottom of the local racial hierarchy, yet at the same time also free labor. Compounding all these divisions were issues like language: on the mines, for instance, communication between African and white took place mainly through an impoverished pidgin called fanakolo; in 1904, only five percent of Natal Indians were literate in English.[237]

The marginalized African and Colored middle classes formed and led the early nationalist movements like the SANNC, and the APO. They lived in a situation where cheap African labor formed the bedrock of the mines—as well as state industry, and the growing commercial farming and manufacturing sectors—and where the cheapness of African labor was primarily a function of the blacks’ historic incorporation into the country as a subject people: in this sense, local “capitalist relations of exploitation were constructed upon colonial relations of domination”.[238]

The Union parliament was restricted to white men, the new British Dominion being founded firmly on a principle of white supremacy. Africans were represented largely through traditional authorities—by indirect rule—or through various advisory structures, but were largely ruled by fiat. In the Cape, however, a preexisting qualified franchise based was retained into the 1930s. In that province, one-third of white men were disenfranchized in 1909, while Africans and Coloreds comprised 15 percent of the electorate.[239] A similar, albeit far more restrictive, system operated in Natal. In the two northern provinces, race sufficed as a voting qualification.

Laborite and Communist approaches to the national question

On the eve of apartheid in 1948—in which Afrikaner nationalists extended the segregation policies of the first four decades of Union— there were two main approaches to the national question on the part of labor and the left.

The first was identified with the mainstream white labor movement, and dated back to the late 19^th century: social democracy plus segregation, with welfare and industrial reform running alongside job reservation and preferential employment for whites, urban segregation, and Asian repatriation. Essentially, this “White Laborism” answered the national question by seeking to perpetuate white domination—sometimes softened by a rhetorical support for Africans and Coloreds “developing on their own lines” in reserved areas.

White Laborism was the platform of the union-backed South African (SA) Labor Party launched in 1910.[240] It was also identified with the main union center, the South African Industrial Federation (SAIF), a loose body claiming 47,001 members in 45 affiliated unions in 1919.[241] White Laborism’s roots lay partly in the traditions of the first unions: these were craft bodies formed by immigrants, mainly from the 1880s, and their craft exclusiveness soon blurred into a larger racial exclusiveness; this was carried over into later industrial unions, and was reinforced by fierce class struggles that saw employers pit African and white against one another. The most tumultuous was the great Rand Revolt of 1922—a general strike by white labor that escalated into an armed rebellion, as well as racial clashes—which was directly precipitated by an attempt to replace white miners with African miners. Many elements of White Laborism would be adopted by mainstream Afrikaner nationalism.

The second key approach to the national question was identified with the CPSA from 1928 when—under pressure from the Communist International (Comintern)—it adopted the “Native Republic” thesis. This defined the key task of the party as establishing “an Independent South African Native Republic as a stage towards the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic, guaranteeing protection and complete equality towards all national minorities”.[242] This approach effectively answered the national question by separating national liberation and socialism into separate stages with distinct strategic tasks, with the first stage aiming at the “bourgeois-democratic” goal of black majorityrule in an independent republic. (The Comintern applied this twostage approach—formal independence first, socialism later—across the colonial and semi-colonial world at this time, also considering it as a program for the “black belt” region of the United States of America).[243]

There was some disagreement in the CPSA over the concrete implications of the Native Republic. In the first place, the new approach was adopted during Comintern’s “New Line” era (1928–1935), which stressed the need to Bolshevize parties by purging unreliable elements, and to end all cooperation with noncommunists: revolution was assumed to be imminent.[244] This suggested that the CPSA would lead both stages, if necessary through front organizations. This lent itself, in turn, to the view that the Native Republic would assume a radical character under party control, and so, shift rapidly into socialism—rather like Mao Zedong’s and Le Duan’s version of two-stage theory.[245]

After the New Line era ended, the approach was abandoned. The party was initially divided over whether the CPSA should lead the first stage of the struggle, or leave that role to the African (or perhaps even the Afrikaner) nationalists.[246] Ultimately, it decided to aim at a “united front” of “all nationalities and all anti-colonialist classes”, led by the ANC and fighting for a unitary, democratic and capitalist state with land reform and partial nationalization.[247] Thus if the two-stage theory had always suggested that the first stage be undertaken by some sort of cross-class nationalist front, this final formulation suggested that this must be embodied in an explicitly nationalist movement for “nationaldemocratic revolution,” independent of party control.

The party had, in effect, ultimately reduced itself a support group for the African nationalists, viewing nationalism as the true bearer of national liberation, rather than as merely one approach to national liberation. Thus, the CPSA/SACP—which was in the 1930s and 1940s both numerically larger than the ANC, and dramatically more influential in unions and in black communities—surrendered its energies, and its proclaimed vanguard role, to its weaker nationalist rival.

The Communist school analysis of the early left

As the CPSA developed, its leadership naturally wished to chronicle its history and to establish its claims to be “the true vanguard of the workers in the fight for the liberation of South Africa”, bathed in the “light of Marxist-Leninist science”.[248] As part of this project, the Communist school argued that the pre-CPSA left was comprised of two main currents, often co-existing within the same groups.

The first comprised the proto-Bolsheviks, a minority described as the “Communist nucleus” of “true socialists”.[249] This referred to a number of veteran radicals who not only helped found but also played a key role in CPSA. In Communist school texts, these activists are seen to have a sort of instinctive Bolshevism even before the CPSA, supposedly “closely approaching the stand of Lenin”.[250] Later, this provided the foundation of the CPSA. The other current comprised, supposedly, everyone else on the early left—the anarchists and syndicalists featuring prominently but, critically, as never more than an annoying minority—and was basically seen as providing a series of object lessons in the errors of “ultra-left” posturing, sectarian ineffectiveness, and abstract dogmatism.

In general, then, the pre-CPSA left was seen as rather a failure, although it contained within itself the germs of the “true vanguard”. This was exemplified by its approaches to the national question: the proto-Bolshevik minority advocated “a more strictly ‘working class’ attitude towards the blacks”;[251] the rest, predictably, failed to address the national question adequately. At best, they “ignored” the “revolutionary significance” of equal rights.[252] Viewing “the national oppression of the majority of people in our country” as “not really very worthy of consideration”,[253] they “studiously” “evaded the color issue”.[254] At worst, they embraced key elements of White Laborism, and overtly supported segregation and color bars.[255]

It fell to the proto-Bolsheviks, then, to “pioneer socialist work among the black workers”, and move “step by step” towards an “appreciation” of the “true nature” of the problem.[256] Despite their great efforts, even these bold pioneers failed. It was only in the CPSA of the late 1920s that the national question was first adequately addressed, when with the “fraternal assistance of the world Communist movement and the inspiration of Lenin’s ideas”, the CPSA adopted the “Native Republic” thesis.[257] Only then could the party grasp the “revolutionary” character of African nationalism, leading to the “fusion” of class struggle and national struggle—in concrete terms, an alliance between the CPSA/ SACP and the ANC, finally established in the late 1940s.[258]

According to this narrative, in short, the left before the CPSA was basically a white movement; it could only indigenize from the late 1920s when it adopted the two-stage approach; and it was the growing understanding of Marxism-Leninism—the achievement, alone, of the CPSA/SACP—that first provided an adequate basis to address the national question. This narrative then points to the rapid recruitment of people of color into the CPSA in the late 1920s as evidence of the correctness of the Native Republic, and as, supposedly, the first instance of black adherence to a radical socialist position.

Emergent anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa, 1886–1913

These claims are all highly doubtful, as indicated in the opening statements in this chapter, and as will be now demonstrated in the following discussion. The local anarchist tradition may be dated back to the 1880s and the tireless efforts of Henry Glasse. An Englishman born in 1857 in Surat, India, Glasse was involved in radical London circles before moving to Port Elizabeth by the start of the 1880s.[259] This was a thriving port but rapidly losing ground to Cape Town—capital of the Cape Colony, and later the seat of the Union parliament—in the battle for trade with the inland mining centers.[260]

Glasse worked in a range of jobs, including a stint on the Witwatersrand mines, wrote for Peter Kropotkin’s Freedom in London and the Cape labor press, and engaged with workers through the local Mechanics’ Institute, a worker-education center.[261] In short, he was rather typical of the radical European immigrants who introduced the various socialist trends into South Africa in the late 19^th century.[262]

It was in South Africa that Glasse translated a number of key works by Kropotkin; these remain the standard English editions. He also acted as a local distributor of Freedom Press materials, like Errico Malatesta’s pamphlets, and Kropotkin’s Russian-language paper, Kleb i Volya (“Bread and Liberty”), which was sold mainly to local Jewish anarchists.[263] In 1901, Freedom Press published Glasse’s Socialism the Remedy,[264] and the following year his The Superstition of Government was honored by being jointly published with Kropotkin’s Organized Vengeance, Called “Justice”.[265] Around this time, he managed to form a Socialist Club, to which he gave his “exposition of Socialism from the Anarchist or Libertarian Standpoint” to a “very good audience”.[266] Like Kropotkin, he was very favorably disposed to syndicalism, looking to the “great and final conflict—the General Strike which will also be the Social Revolution”.[267]

While Glasse’s writings sometimes rested on fairly general and abstract arguments (“Peasant, seize the land; workman, seize the factory”),[268] he was keenly aware of the impact of colonialism, and the specific problems faced by Africans as a conquered people. Writing to Kropotkin, he argued:[269]

I have worked in the mine with them, and lived among them in the Cape Colony, and now I am trading with them; and I can assure you, dear comrade, that I would rather live among them, than among many who call themselves ‘civilized’. You can still find among them the principle of Communism—primitive Communism ... I have seen among them, such brotherly love, such human feelings, such help for one another that are quite unknown between ‘civilized’ people ...

Glasse’s idealization of pre-capitalist cultures (and ironic play on the Western claim to be “civilized”) was linked to a detailed critique of an order that “robbed and ill-treated” the Africans:

They must not walk on the pavement, but in the middle of the road. They must not ride in cabs or tram, and in the trains there are separate compartments for them, just like cattle trucks. They must have passes a la Russia, and are allowed to live only in the ‘location’, those Ghettos set aside for them. They are not allowed to be on the streets after 9 p.m., in the land that was once their own—their Fatherland!

This outraged critique was a critical step in the application of anarchist working class internationalism to the South African situation. Glasse took a further, crucial, step when he argued for an interracial working class movement with the correct position “in regard to the native and colored question”: race hatred was used to divide and rule.[270] “For a white worker in this South Africa to pretend he can successfully fight his battle independent of the colored wage slaves—the vast majority—is, to my mind, simply idiocy”.[271]

This line of thought was also characteristic of the Cape Town-based SDF. This was founded on May Day, 1904, emerged from among skilled white workers, and in 1905, co-organized Cape Town’s first May Day with the local Trades and Labor Council.[272] The city had grown dramatically: in 1891, Port Elizabeth’s population was 23,000 compared to Cape Town’s 79,000; by 1904, the figures were 33,000 to 170,000, respectively.[273] It had been boosted by 70,000 newcomers: 34,000 from Europe, mainly from Britain, but including 9,000 Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe; 21,000 Coloreds; 9,000 Africans; 2,000 Afrikaners; and 2,000 Indians.[274] A major port, it benefited from close links to Kimberley and Johannesburg and British military activity, and developed a significant manufacturing and service sector with the aid of access to cheap imported inputs for products like paint and soap.[275]

Port Elizabeth was a largely African and white city, but Cape Town was shaped decisively by the large Colored population. In the South African context, “Colored” refers to a category of Westernized, mixed-race, people of color largely descended from the old Cape’s underclasses, and mainly Afrikaans-speaking. In the local racial hierarchy, Coloreds stood above the Africans, but below the dominant whites, although most were wretchedly poor. Not only did the majority of Coloreds live in the western and northern Cape, including Cape Town and Kimberley, but in these regions they formed the clear majority overall. Moreover, the combined Colored and white population in these areas greatly overshadowed the African population. Africans were only 4 percent of the Cape Town population by 1921,[276] and just 14 percent of the city’s industrial workforce in 1924 despite rapid industrialization.[277]

This demography was quite unique in the Union, and meant that the majority of the Cape Town working class was free labor. While most Coloreds were laborers, there was an important and growing artisan layer,[278] many of whom could vote. There was also a relatively high degree of social integration between Colored and white: for example, many although not all Cape craft unions admitted Coloreds, quite unlike the situation in other regions.[279] The Cape Federation of Labor Unions (1913, succeeding bodies like the Trades and Labor Council) therefore remained outside the segregationist SAIF, which in turn made few inroads into the northern and western Cape.[280] The Federation was rather small, with sixteen affiliates by 1919, the largest with barely 400 members; it was not more than 6,000 strong.[281] Yet Coloreds faced growing official segregation and popular discrimination from the late 19^th century, with low Colored wages a symptom of a widening divide in the working class movement.[282]

The SDF appears in the Communist school texts as a small church of “evangelical socialists” that ignored issues like race,[283] while supposedly cleaving to the dogmatic Marxism of “Hyndman in England”.[284] This is rather an uncharitable, not to mention misleading, description of an organization that was by any measure one of the most important socialist groups before the CPSA. With a large and often dominant anarchist wing, its achievements included organizing interracial unions and unemployed demonstrations, producing the country’s first 20^th century socialist paper, and being the first left group to have its members jailed for their anti-capitalist beliefs; it also helped found the CPSA itself.

Initially, the SDF was a moderate body, and statist besides, with a reform platform that did not even mention socialism, despite the group’s early sympathy for H.M. Hyndman’s Marxist SDF in Britain.[285] From this improbable beginning, the group would come to play a key role in the emergence of a strong anarchist current in Cape Town.

In the first place, unlike the Hyndman SDF, its membership was always politically diverse, including “anarchists, reform socialists, guild socialists”,70 with the strong “anarchist section” including key figures like “Levinson, Strauss, Hahne, Ahrens and others ... all of European origin”.[286] Glasse also linked up with the group, writing for its press.[287] These anarchists played a key role in pushing the organization to the left, and set its pace; although it was never a purely anarchist formation, it cannot be described in any meaningful way as “Marxist”,[288] nor properly understood unless the often dominant anarchist influence is admitted.

In the second place, there was a major conflict among the founder members in the first two years: this led the more moderate and statist element to withdraw, and left Harrison, a carpenter, unionist and exsoldier, the key figure in the SDF. Harrison’s ascendancy was important not only because of his excellent organizing skills, charisma and dynamism, but also because of his deep commitment to anarchism. A “staunch and unwavering class fighter”,[289] he was a brilliant speaker who embraced the views of his friend Kropotkin.[290] It was Harrison who first used the word “communism” in the South African press, discussing anarchist-communism.[291] An “inveterate soap-box orator” who breathed “hellfire and brimstone at capitalism” with a “fluent tongue”,[292] he told crowds of Africans, Coloreds and whites at SDF rallies that:[293]

Capitalism was on its last legs ... Fields, factories and workshops were to be owned and controlled by those who worked in them ... Kropotkin had proved that the problem of production had been solved. It now remained only a question of ownership and distribution ... laws—as we know them—will be quite unnecessary.

Even skeptics were impressed by the “forceful and appealing way” he “presented his case”, which “might almost have convinced many that the Social and Economic Revolution was about to take place next day, or at the very latest by the end of that week”. The SDF’s short-lived monthly, the Cape Socialist, continued the theme, mixing commentary and notices with lengthy extracts from Kropotkin, courtesy of Glasse.[294]

The SDF set up a bookshop, reading room, refreshment bar, a “Socialist Hall” and reading circle at its first offices in Adderley street, and held Sunday talks at the van Riebeeck statue on the Cape Parade, the central public space; it also hired the City Hall on occasion; there were also SDF events at the “Stone” in Clifton street in District Six, a multiracial but mainly Colored slum.[295] Both the statue and the Stone provided Hyde Park-style speaker’s corners, the former frequented mainly by Coloreds and whites, the latter mainly by Coloreds and Africans. Activities at the Stone were organized via former APO leader, unionist, and SDF sympathizer, John Tobin. Obsessed with using every available platform for propaganda, the SDF, the anarchist Harrison included, stood candidates in elections—without any real intention of taking office if elected.

Major SDF events could attract thousands of people. When the SDF campaigned against World War I, its meetings at the Parade packed the Dock Road from the Flat Iron Building to the Carlton Hotel.[296] Unlike the more segregated public sphere elsewhere, these public events routinely attracted significant numbers of Coloreds, as well as some Africans. As the SDF grew, it relocated to larger offices in Plein and Barrack streets, where it sublet space to unions,[297] ran a refreshment bar, and kept a printing press.[298] It provided members with an active social life, with visits to the beach, a choir, and even a few socialist christenings.[299]

The SDF kept its platform open to a range of controversial speakers, like the young Mohandas Gandhi—then emerging as a champion of the local Indians—who at the time “declared himself a Socialist”.[300] When James Keir Hardie of Britain’s Independent Labor Party toured South Africa in 1908, he was dogged by hostile white crowds incensed at his defense of African and Indian claims.[301] After the Cape Trades and Labor Council fearfully canceled his reception, it was the SDF who hosted Hardie in an event that he fondly recalled as “far and away the most enthusiastic I had”.[302] In 1910, it hosted British syndicalist Tom Mann, another radical who defended people of color, impressing the APO with his “vigorous appeal to all wage-earners to organize and present a united front”.[303]

Across the color line: the SDF achievement

These actions show up the Communist school claim that the SDF “ignored” race or saw it as a “side issue”, or never “in practice” took “steps to organize the nonwhite worker or to openly propagate racial equality”.[304] Identifying with Hardie, and then Mann, strengthened its already favorable reputation among Coloreds, but that reputation rested on a deeper opposition to racism. Like Glasse, Harrison viewed racial prejudice as basically caused by capitalism, and as antithetical to working class interests: he was quick to put down the perennial hecklers on this issue.[305]

Alone on the Cape union and left scene, the SDF condemned the draft Act of the Union of South Africa in 1909: its color bar clauses were “contrary to all Democratic principles, and an insult to the colored races of South Africa”.[306] This aligned it with the APO, then mounting a vigorous campaign against what it viewed as an “un-British” and “retrogressive” bill.[307] While the SDF participated in several of the meetings leading to the founding of the SA Labor Party, it withdrew once a reformist and segregationist platform was adopted.[308] The SDF’s unstinting critique of the British Empire even garnered praise from De Burger (“The Citizen”), the Afrikaner nationalist paper then edited by D.F. Malan.[309]

By 1910 the SDF could report that it was developing a Colored constituency,[310] anticipating the interracial membership of the CPSA by nearly twenty years. Such, indeed, was its credibility of the SDF among Coloreds that Harrison won 212 votes against APO leader Doctor Abdullah Abdurrahman’s 543 in a campaign in District Six,[311] notwithstanding Abdurrahman’s powerful political machine. Meanwhile, the SDF set up a propaganda commission to reach Africans, gave talks in Afrikaans as well as isiXhosa, drew people of color into its committees, and reach out to the APO; this influenced Abdurrahman himself to sometimes employ socialist rhetoric.[312] The APO hired the Socialist Hall for its 1909 conference, and backed an SDF candidate in the 1910 municipal elections.[313]

Meanwhile, SDF activists like Harrison and J. Dibble of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners sought to remove union color bars, to unionize Coloreds, and to secure equal pay.[314] As noted, some Cape craft unions admitted Coloreds. Now, Harrison and company pushed this further: in 1905, the SDF, with Trades and Labor Council backing launched the SA General Workers’ Union, “open to all branches of labor who have not a specific Union to join”, regardless of race.[315] It drew in Colored and white bricklayers and painters, Jewish tailors and boot makers, tramway workers, and Greek and Jewish cigarette rollers, becoming a major part of the local union movement.[316] SDF members and Jewish workers also initiated a tailors’ union of “all nationalities”, although this had little success in drawing in Coloreds.[317] With the APO and others, the SDF set out to unionize the cabinet makers, painters, printers and paperhangers. When the cigarette rollers struck, and were locked out, the strikers set up a “Knock Out” and “Lock Out” cigarette cooperative on SDF premises; SDF enthusiasts had previously set up short-lived cooperatives by bakers and boot makers.[318]

The onset of depression helped drive the strikes, and also prompted SDF efforts at running soup kitchens in District Six.[319] The SDF also took the lead in organized mass meetings of the multiracial unemployed in mid-1906, where cigarette maker and SDF anarchist Levinson called for direct action by the hungry.[320] Young German radical Otto Meyer demanded the crowds “Bring arms, and plenty of ammunition and a black flag”.[321] Marches on parliament, led by Harrison, Tobin and others, and backed by the APO and the unions, eventually led to three days of looting and clashes with police.[322] Nearly fifty rioters were arrested and charged,[323] while Levinson, Cape Socialist editor Abraham Needham, and Meyer were arrested for inflammatory speeches—“the first time ... South African socialists found themselves jailed for their beliefs”.[324] Although Levinson was acquitted, Meyer got twelve months with hard labor.[325]

Syndicalism on the Witwatersrand

Around this time, the left on the Witwatersrand displaced that of the western Cape in importance. A critical development was the 1908 launch of South Africa’s first socialist weekly, the Voice of Labor, in Johannesburg. Initially this paper was a free information sheet used to promote a short-lived General Workers’ Union at the Witwatersrand, Kimberley and Bloemfontein, the latter the capital of the old Orange Free State. When the union foundered, the paper was reinvented as a socialist paper by Archie Crawford, a radical fitter, and his partner Mary Fitzgerald; it claimed a very respectable circulation of 2,000 at its height. The energetic Harrison helped proofread the paper, wrote pieces, and arranged for its Cape distribution via the SDF.[326]

In practice, the Voice of Labor was basically an open forum that networked “the leading Socialists of Durban, Kimberley, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Cape Town and Johannesburg”,[327] and sometimes Southern Rhodesia. Its contents were consequently very varied, especially initially: alongside articles on “The State and the Child” and “Good Government” could be found articles on anarchism, syndicalism, and the merits of direct action over parliamentary politics by Glasse, Harrison and others.[328]

Crawford (and thus, the Voice of Labor) appears in the works of the Communist school as a man “tempted to compromise” on race, who “evaded the color issue” and failed to critique the SA Labor Party’s embrace of “white supremacy”.[329] This demonstrates the Communist school’s tendency to caricature the pre-CPSA left, for Crawford repeatedly insisted, on the contrary, that “Socialism passes over geographic boundaries and transcends all lines, which some diseased organs of society seek ... to draw between Races and colors”.[330]

Crawford dismissed segregation as “foolish in the extreme”, lambasted the unions for ignoring the “300,000 colored workers on the Rand, two-thirds ... on the mines”, and championed the local Indians’ struggle against increasingly restrictive legislation.[331] He walked out of the founding of the SA Labor Party when his opposition to its segregationist platform was rejected,[332] and ran as a candidate for the small Socialist Party in the 1910 general elections. In his campaign, Crawford argued “on the question of Color, and at more than one time it looked like he would be torn to pieces by an ignorant mob”.[333]

The significance of Crawford’s stance as editor was that it set the tone for the Voice and the network that emerged around it, with a solid commitment to working class solidarity across the color line that also linked it to IWW-style syndicalism then emerging locally. Local radicals shared the “disillusion ... in the value of parliamentary reform” that was “spreading from Europe, from Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand”, and embraced the “doctrines of the revolutionary Syndicalists with their faith in the industrial struggle and the general strike and their mistrust of politics”.[334]

Mann’s 1910 tour, which preached the “gospel ... of a complete change of society” and the “perfected system industrial organization to make this possible”,[335] directly inspired the founding of the local SLP in Johannesburg in March 1910.[336] Often misunderstood as a “Marxist” organization,[337] it was a syndicalist group following the doctrines of Daniel De Leon, the American IWW leader. Links with De Leonism were mainly, however, with the SLP in Scotland, which was the core of the British SLP (1903),[338] rather than De Leon in Detroit. Scots provided key members of the local group: Jock Campbell, the “leader”,[339] J.M. Gibson, the key ideologue, John Campbell, and Ralph Rabb and W. Reid. Also important were Jews like Israel Israelstam, who also had links to the Jewish Bund and the SDF,[340] Englishmen like the union activist Charlie Tyler, and even that rarity on the left, an Afrikaner, the chemist Philip Roux.

At Mann’s urging, the Witwatersrand Trades and Labor Council— forerunner of the SAIF—sponsored an Industrial Workers Union to organize workers ineligible for the craft bodies.[341] This held regular Sunday night meetings at the Market Square—Johannesburg’s equivalent of Cape Town’s Parade—and managed to secure the affiliation of the independent Bootmakers’ Association, the Bakers’ and Confectioners’ Society, and the Tailors’ Society. Local syndicalists like the Irish tram driver Tom Glynn nonetheless viewed the union as a “disgrace to the originators” of radical industrial unionism, the IWW, because of its links to the moderate Council and the segregationist SA Labor Party.[342]

Rather than boycott the Industrial Workers Union, however, the syndicalists entered it. Glynn was soon elected its secretary-general, and along with other “industrialists”—notably the Scottish blacksmith, Dunbar—“captured the organization and put it on a proper basis” in June 1910.[343] It was renamed the IWW, called itself a “class-conscious revolutionary organization embracing all workers regardless of craft, race or color”, declared war on craft unionism, and linked up with the IWW in Chicago.[344]

Dunbar was a “hefty, stubborn-headed, well-meaning Scotsman”: a fine orator, he made his reputation leading a two-week strike on the Natal railways in 1906,[345] and despised all political parties.[346] He was a fixture at the IWW’s Sunday night meetings at the Market Square—held separately from those of the SLP, which met there in the mornings, where the party sold a “steady stream of journals and pamphlets” like The Socialist from Scotland and The Weekly People from the United States.[347]

Despite the loss of supporters like the Bootmakers’, who protested the new direction, the IWW held successful meetings at the government railway yards in Pretoria, the old Transvaal capital which lay just north of Johannesburg, setting up a “Pretoria Local”.[348] The IWW was also established in the port city of Durban, the principal center in Natal.[349] This section was strongly identified with a “comrade Webber”, who specialized in “phrase-making, blood-curdling class war propaganda”.[350] He debated Tommy Boydell of the SA Labor Party before a large crowd at the Durban Town Gardens on “Syndicalism versus Socialism”.

Like Cape Town, Durban was defined by “the harbor, the railway and the commerce with the mineral-rich interior”,[351] and developed a significant service and manufacturing sector. The two cities accounted, in fact, for more than half of national manufacturing by the 1920s.[352] From 1905 Durban had the shortest rail link to the Witwatersrand, enabling it to replace Cape Town as the main port.[353] The population by 1910 was 65,000 (around half was white, primarily English-speaking),[354] although the total number doubles if the outlying areas are included.[355] A quarter of the settled population were Indians, mainly descended from indentured laborers, largely low-caste Hindus. While an Indian bourgeoisie emerged, most local Indians were workers, along with small farmers and an educated elite: doctors, interpreters, lawyers, teachers and clerks.[356] Despite the best efforts of officials to whittle down the Indian vote, it was a serious factor in a number of wards in Durban.

While the IWW in Pretoria and Durban seem to have been primarily propaganda circles, in Johannesburg the IWW successfully formed a powerful Municipal Industrial Union among the white tram drivers and conductors employed by the city. This followed a successful wildcat strike led by Glynn, which was also supported by the municipal power station’s staff. Gathered at the tram yards in Newtown, and wearing “bits of red ribbon”, the strikers forced the municipality to capitulate within hours.[357] The IWW subsequently boasted of its intention to break the restrictive labor laws, which stipulated compulsory conciliation, whenever necessary.[358] The American IWW press was enthusiastic: “they are getting on the right track down in the Southern Hemisphere”.[359]

With between 300 and 400 members, the IWW now compared favorably to major unions like the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (the ASE, with 1351 in 1910) and the Transvaal Miners Association (at 800 in 1909).[360] A second strike followed on the trams in April 1911. This was precipitated by the sacking of Wobblies Glynn and W.P. Glendon after the IWW led a boycott of an official inquiry, in the course of which a witness was assaulted.[361]

Following fiery speeches at the tramway sheds and at the Market Square, attended by around 500 people, a second strike began. It was waged in the face of a ban on public meetings, with clashes with police led by women like Fitzgerald, and the arrest of the SLP’s John Campbell, the IWW’s Dunbar and the SA Labor Party’s Andrews for speeches.[362] Two IWWs, William Whittaker and T. Morant, were arrested when dynamite was found on the tram tracks.[363] The strike collapsed after a week, 70 workers were fired, and Glynn got three months hard labor, commenting that “if Government ownership, as our political Socialists tell us, is a ‘step in the right direction’ God help the slaves when they take the wrong one”.[364]

Still, the IWW scored a point when it was shown that Whittaker and Morant had been framed by John Sherman, an agent provocateur.[365] This led to a series of large IWW meetings in Pretoria that denounced that “working class traitor and spy”, now working on the railways.[366] In Johannesburg, meanwhile, the Market Square meetings continued to attract considerable crowds.[367] In October 1911 a “Pickhandle Brigade”, including Dunbar, Glynn, Fitzgerald and Morant, disrupted the election meetings of incumbent councilors who had been involved in the crackdown on the IWW tramway workers.[368] Glynn, however, was blacklisted locally, and eventually left the country: he ended up in Australia, where he edited the IWW’s Direct Action and was arrested during the wartime repression of the Wobblies.[369]

The Voice of Labor had also become something of a de facto syndicalist organ at this time. Crawford left the country from 1910 to 1911, visiting radical labor groups in three continents. The editorship now passed to “Proletarian” in Cape Town—probably the Cape militant Ferdinand Marais—a vociferous syndicalist. The paper never quite lost its open character, but its copy was now heavily weighted towards IWW and SLP materials.[370] As an observer noted at the time, “From Trades Unionism and Politics”, the Voice had “flowed to Industrial

Unionism and Direct Action”.[371] Even the SDF was swept up in the syndicalist wave. It joined the IWW, SLP and the Johannesburg-based Socialist Party in a short-lived “Industrial Freedom League” for a “united advocacy of Industrial Unionism” in May 1911.[372]

The IWW, the SLP and the national question on the Witwatersrand

As noted above, Crawford’s reputation has fared badly at the hands of the Communist School. So, too, it must be said, have those of the IWW and SLP. Relying on the Communist school, Elaine Katz viewed these groups as failing to take a principled position on the national question.[373] She added the charge that the IWW complained bitterly in the Voice of Labor about the use of auxiliary African police in the May 1911 tramway strike.[374] Pieter van Duin cited Communist school works, plus Katz, to make even bolder critiques of the IWW.[375] Marcel van der Linden, in turn, cited Katz and van Duin in order to suggest that the South African IWW was remarkable for breaking with the traditional syndicalist opposition to racism.[376]

The problem, however, is that the primary material provides little support for these arguments. In the first place, the IWW’s statement in the Voice of Labor, to which Katz alluded, did not take issue with the race of the police—only the repressive actions of the police in general, black or white.[377] One speaker who took the platform in the mid-1911 strike is on record for fuming against the use of black forces against white strikers: he was, however, a member of the SA Labor Party, not of the syndicalist IWW or SLP.[378]

The position of the IWW on the national question was unambiguous: “fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black”.[379] The SLP men, too, were “pioneers in the adoption of an enlightened policy towards the Colored peoples”, promoting “unity among all wage slaves, regardless of color”; Jock Campbell was famed as the first Witwatersrand socialist “to make propaganda among the African workers”.[380] Mann’s tour provided a further reference point, for he told his Johannesburg audience: “Whatever number there are, get at them all, and if there are another 170,000 available, white or black, get at them too”.[381] He viewed the local unions as beset by a “suicidal sectional unionism” and lambasted the white man acting “towards the black man as a most superior and lordly personage”.[382]

“Proletarian”, likewise, advocated “an organization of wage-workers, black and white, male and female, young and old”, which would proclaim “a universal general strike preparatory to seizing and running the interests of South Africa, for the benefit of workers to the exclusion of parasites”.[383] The African workers would inevitably organize for “mutual protection” and “revolt against wage slavery”, and the “only logical thing for white slaves to do is to throw in their lot with the black wage slave in a common assault on the capitalist system”. “Proletarian” opposed the Defense Bill introduced soon after Union, which established the national army while essentially restricting armed service in the national army to whites. This was partly on anti-militarist grounds, but partly because he viewed the Bill as a deliberate attempt to use white workers against black: a “native rising”, he stressed, would be a “wholly justified” response to “cruel exploitation” and should receive the active “sympathy and support of every white wage-slave”.[384]

It follows that the de facto failure of the IWW and SLP to recruit across the color line, thereby realizing their vision of an interracial One Big Union, cannot be attributed to racial prejudice or to obliviousness to the national question. Rather, it reflected their overall weakness as union organizers, at least outside the trams. This was compounded by the enormous practical difficulties of organizing the unfree African workers, the majority of the Witwatersrand working class.

The IWW and SLP’s strength lay rather in public propaganda, like the Market Square meetings, where radical speakers traditionally attracted a “little knot of native and colored men”.[385] Leading politicians like John X. Merriman were convinced that the “ravings of the syndicalists” were “appealing, not I fear without success, both to the poorer Dutch [the Afrikaners] and to the Natives”.[386]

At the same time, the failure to really organize across the color line also indicated the lack of a clear strategy to systematically develop linkages with workers of color. Specifically, the IWW and SLP did not link their principled opposition to racial oppression with active and specific efforts to mobilize African, Colored, and Indian workers around both their class and national concerns.[387] In this sense, the SDF in Cape Town was more effective in addressing the national question, even though the SA General Workers’ Union lacked the grandiose syndicalist program of the IWW and SLP.

The stormy years, 1913–1914

In May 1913, a dramatic general strike on the Witwatersrand started, which “shook the country like nothing had done since the Boer War”.[388] Initiated by white miners, it spiraled rapidly across industries. Just as quickly, it slipped out of the control of the main unions involved, the Transvaal Federation of Trade Unions (another predecessor of the SAIF), and the independent National Union of Railway and Harbor Servants (NURHAS). On “Black Saturday”, July 5, imperial troops shot 25 people dead.[389] Riots and gun battles left strikers in control of large parts of Johannesburg, the crowds drawing in the unemployed, the poor whites, and even some “Colored men”.[390]

This was followed by a series of impressive strikes by African miners, lasting three days and involving 9,000.[391] In October 1913, sporadic Indian passive resistance campaigns took a new turn with a general strike among Natal Indians on the coalfields, sugar farms and mills, and railways. This centered a £3 annual poll tax imposed on exindentured laborers, was initiated by Gandhi, and drew in 5,000.[392]

The failure of the compromise that ended the 1913 general strike then led to a second general strike in January 1914. This time the state acted quickly, mobilizing the new South African Defense Force and the rural commando militia, declaring martial law, raiding the unions, arresting hundreds, and deporting nine key activists (among them, Crawford).

Several months later, the enforced social peace was again shattered when the country entered World War I on the British side. While the SANNC, APO and local Indian Congress suspended their activities to rally to the flag, hard-line Afrikaner nationalists launched an armed rebellion that split the army and mobilized around 12,000 insurgents, mainly rural poor whites.[393] The SDF suffered a split when its pro-war minority broke away in September 1914. The SA Labor Party—which had grown massively in the wake of the massive labor struggles of 1913 and 1914—also split in 1915, when its radical anti-war section walked out.

Anarchism and syndicalism certainly played a role in all of the events of the stormy years. However, the official insistence that the two general strikes were the work of a “Syndicalist Conspiracy” is misleading.[394] The syndicalist movement on the Witwatersrand was weak and divided by 1913.

On his return to South Africa, Crawford had attempted to forge a United Socialist Party, “without discrimination as to race, sex, color or creed”, including the IWW, SDF, SLP and other groups.[395] The United Socialist Party platform was too vague to satisfy anyone and quite unable to overcome the existing divisions: the constituent groups were already firmly wedded to their existing programs; besides, each group clung jealously to its autonomy.[396]

The SLP and IWW, for instance, had long sniped at one another, each being preoccupied with its claim to represent the “real” IWW tradition.[397] Despite his professed interest in left unity, Crawford himself waged a campaign against Dunbar in 1911 and 1912 that effectively destroyed the IWW. The SLP also left the new party: “the U.S.P. believes in political reform whereas the emancipation of the working class can only be accomplished through their organization on the industrial field”;[398] SLP activists seemed to have then begun to work in the SA Labor Party.[399] The United Socialist Party fell apart, and the Voice of Labor, citing apathy and financial problems, closed in December 1912.[400]

In the form of an organized current, then, syndicalism was simply unable to plan, launch, or lead the 1913 and 1914 general strikes. Nonetheless, syndicalist ideas and slogans had “a considerable currency in labor circles” at this time.[401] This was shown, for instance, by speeches that described the “Trades Hall” as “the government”, or suggested “it might be necessary for the strikers to take over the mines and work them themselves”, or called on workers to “have a general strike, and have a revolution”.[402] Such views also found expression in The Strike Herald, produced in 1913 (and revived briefly in 1914) by Crawford and Fitzgerald, both of whom were very prominent in the 1913 riots.

Moreover, the two general strikes plus the war issue re-energized existing anarchists and syndicalists, radicalized new activists, and evoked a widespread interest in radical ideas. There was, in the first instance, an outpouring of new materials, like the De Leonist tract entitled The Great Rand Strike: July, 1913. This drew “lessons” of “service to the proletariat”.[403] As an example of radicalization, an instructive case is provided by George Mason, a carpenter on the mines. Starting as a fairly orthodox SA Labor Party figure, he took the dramatic step of addressing African workers in 1913, when he called on them to strike as well; in 1914, he was deported; by the time public pressure forced the state to allow the deportees to return, he was becoming a staunch syndicalist.[404] As for popular interest in the left, it may be noted that SDF could attract thousands to anti-war rallies, with left influence seen as sufficiently serious that anti-war activists like Harrison were arrested for anti-war literature.[405]

Red, black and white: the ISL and One Big Union among people of color

These developments provided the energy for the rise of the ISL in September 1915. Initial membership drew heavily on syndicalist veterans like Dunbar, Jock Campbell and Tyler. A large component was also provided by the anti-war SA Labor Party activists, like Mason, Andrews, Bunting and Ivon Jones, all radicalized by the 1913–1914 strikes. For Bunting, for instance, the 1913 general strike was the “first act of South Africa’s working class revolution, whose end is not yet”.[406]

The new ISL soon operated across the country (bar Cape Town, in deference to the SDF), and rapidly established itself as the largest left political group prior to the CPSA. Its weekly paper, The International, remains the most impressive of the pre-CPSA periodicals, but was only part of the ISL’s large-scale distribution of local and imported papers, tracts and books. The ISL was formed at an auspicious time— just ahead of a huge wave of class struggles starting in 1917. There were 199 officially recorded strikes from 1906 to 1920: 68 took place between 1916 and 1920, with 175,664 workers were on strike from 1916 to 1922; union membership surged from 9,178 in 1914, to 40,000 in 1917, to more than 135,000 in 1920.[407] A particularly important development in this upsurge was the large-scale entry of people of color into unions outside of the Cape. This was pioneered by bodies like the Industrial Workers of Africa, and exemplified by the dramatic rise of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) in the 1920s.

The ISL is usually presented by the Communist school as fervently Marxist, with its best elements comprising the core of the protoBolsheviks;[408] at most, the Communist school suggests, there was a syndicalist minority in ISL ranks, successfully opposed by the Marxist leadership.[409] The problem with such views is that even a cursory examination of the sources demonstrates that the ISL was an unambiguously syndicalist formation in the IWW tradition. It resolved at its first congress “That we encourage the organization of the workers on industrial or class lines, irrespective of race, color or creed, as the most effective means of providing the necessary force for the emancipation of the workers”.[410]

It was the ISL, above all, that developed the vision and practice of the integrated revolutionary One Big Union as the combined weapon for national liberation and class struggle. The ISL was scathingly critical of white craft unions (and the SA Labor Party) for their “craft scabbery” against one other, and for their “complete oblivion to the sufferings of the lower paid” and “unemployed white workers, mainly women” and “intolerant” attitude “towards the native wage slave”.[411] Betraying workers’ solidarity and class struggle, they disgraced themselves with no-strike pledges for modest wages, “scabbing on Judas”, who at least “demanded thirty pieces” of silver for his treachery.[412] Theirs was a “scab unionism” that pursued sectional privileges for “labor fakers” (as the ISL called the union leaders) and aspiring “labor aristocrats”, at the expense of the larger working class.[413]

The craft unions’ disgrace was compounded by their failure to recognize the rise of the giant corporations and trusts, against which they had “no earthly hope” of standing, especially in the face of mechanization and skill dilution.[414] This new era required industrial unions, united in One Big Union and embracing all workers. Racial prejudice was against the interests of the whole working class—whether white, black, skilled, unskilled, employed, or unemployed—and the tool of “imperialist notions and alarums”.[415]

The instruments of national oppression were means to strengthen the ruling class, as “cheap, helpless and unorganized” African labor ensured “employers generally and particularly industrial employers, that most coveted plum of modern Imperialism, plentiful cheap labor”.[416] The “laws and regulations” which “degrade the native workers to the level of serfs and herded cattle”—including the “denial of civil liberty and political rights”—existed “for the express uses of Capital”, as “weapons ... to be used against all the workers”.[417] Thus, “segregation is a policy of capitalism, not of the labor movement”.[418] The policy of White Laborism was foolish as well as immoral, as explained repeatedly to white workers: “Make no mistake, your puny breakwater—the color bar” cannot hold back the “big colored Industrial Army coming in on the tide of their evolution ... demanding that place in the sun to which every single human on this earth is rightfully entitled”.[419]

What was required was a “new movement” that would “recognize no bounds of craft, no exclusions of color”.[420] This would organize among the unskilled, especially the Africans, paying heed to “the cries of the most despairing and the claims of the most enslaved” workers.[421]

Among its tasks would be “the abolition of all forms of native indenture, compound and passport systems; and the lifting of the native worker to the political and industrial status of the white”:[422] “These tyrant laws must be swept away”,[423] the ISL declared in laying out its radical program. Contrary to the literature’s tendency to treat such race radicalism as a minority position in the organization (supposedly identified with figures like Bunting and Ivon Jones, who had to struggle for the “recognition of the black worker” against the “mass” of ISL members)[424] it formed the very heart of official ISL policy, program and propaganda.

As for strategy, the ISL championed the view that “the Industrial Union” was “the root of all the activities of Labor, whether political, social or otherwise”.[425] Specifically, discriminatory laws had to be “repealed by the strength of Trade Unionism”,[426] expressed in its most advanced form, the One Big Union:[427]

Once organized, these workers can bust-up any tyrannical law. Unorganized, these laws are iron bands. Organize industrially, they become worth no more than the paper rags they are written on.

Such positions were hardly the hallmark of an organization that, as the Communist school claimed, viewed national oppression as “not really very worthy of consideration”,[428] let alone of one that purportedly embraced segregation.[429] On the contrary, the ISL waged a continual ideological struggle against racial discrimination, arguing that “The whole of the fight against capitalism is a fight with the prejudices and capitalist-engendered aversions of the workers”.[430] It systematically critiqued the doctrines of scientific racism as “pure poppycock”, stressing that science showed that “all the fundamental phenomena and capabilities of man are rooted in ... humanity which is Black, White and Brown”.[431]

The ISL’s position was nonetheless very much at odds with the twostage program elaborated by the CPSA and SACP from 1928. It doubted, in the first place, that African nationalists had a program that could genuinely emancipate the black masses. Like “Proletarian” on the APO,[432] the ISL viewed the SANNC as basically the party of “native attorneys and parsons” and the “native property owner”, with interests “completely alien to the great mass of the Native proletariat”.[433] Moreover, these “Labor fakirs of Black South Africa” hesitated to “give attention to the one weapon the ruling class fear—the organization of the native workers”.[434] (The APO and SANNC were certainly moderate at this time: supporting the war effort and the repression of white strikers in 1913 and 1914, they occupied themselves largely with sending polite petitions for minor reforms to the British Crown).

Besides, the ISL argued, the national oppression of workers of color was largely rooted in capitalism, meaning that national liberation under capitalism was unlikely. Moreover, these workers were also oppressed by class, as workers, meaning that their full emancipation from poverty and powerlessness would not be achieved even within the best possible nonracial capitalist order; the color of the capitalists much change, but class exploitation and cheap labor would not.

A two-stage solution was, in short, was neither required nor to be desired: the One Big Union could simultaneously address the national and social questions, and provide the class power at the point of the production that made a thorough, and revolutionary, solution possible.

The ISL and the reform of the existing unions

The ISL aimed to reform the white unions, while taking the lead in organizing among people of color, “the great mass of the proletariat”, “black, and therefore disenfranchized and socially outcast”.[435] At times it ran in elections, usually with abysmal results, seeing the “white political field” as a “fine opportunity of forcing the issue” of “solidarity with the native workers”, and “an echo of this propaganda reaches the native workers as well”.[436]

ISL union leaders and activists, like Andrews of the ASE, sought to reform the white unions into syndicalist bodies.[437] In mid-1916, several unions formed the BWIU, with a syndicalist-influenced platform: it aimed to organize industrially, and cultivate “sufficient knowledge and power to enable the Union ultimately to control effectively the Building Industry”.[438] ISL militant Tyler was its provisional secretary, and subsequently, its secretary-general and organizer.[439] Still, the International worried, “at the risk of being thought hypercritics”, whether the union would admit “colored fellow workers”—[440] correctly, as it turned out, for many BWIU locals were segregationist.

In August 1917, the ISL hosted a conference “to discuss ways and means of urging the workers to unite and organize industrially ... and eventually to take over the control of the industry”.[441] It attracted fortyfive people—remarkably, including three Africans—and established a multi-racial Manifesto Committee, later renamed the Solidarity Committee.

The Committee’s manifesto, distributed at the December 1917 SAIF congress, attacked the existing unions for “their narrow craft vanity, their still narrower color prejudice, their exclusive benefit funds, their compromising with the robber system, their friendly agreements with their masters to the neglect of the bottom toiler, their scabbery on the unskilled and one another”.[442] They were a “delusion and a snare”, and served “only the interests of the Capitalists”, and had to be superseded by interracial and revolutionary industrial unions, linked up in one National Industrial Union. This “one Industrial Union will become the

Parliament of Labor and form an integral part of the International Industrial Republic”. Supporters of this project were invited to attend a conference in Easter 1918, but only members of the International Socialist League and the Industrial Workers of Africa (of which, see below) were present at the event.[443]

An alternative means to contest the established unions was suggested by the Shop Stewards’ and Workers’ Committee Movement in Britain. This was essentially an independent rank-and-file movement that overlapped with the existing unions, but was willing to defy the union leaders in order to wage militant class struggle: “We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them”.[444] It was basically a form of syndicalism, which aimed at “control of the workshop, control of the Industry ... and ... Industrial Democracy”,[445] via one “great Industrial Union of the Working Class”.[446] This was also shown by its close ties with the British SLP ad the American IWW, including an arrangement for the interchange of membership cards with the latter.[447]

Andrews, as the ISL’s most senior unionist, had been sent abroad in 1917 as delegate to several international socialist and labor conferences. In Britain, he addressed the Clyde Workers Committee, where he “reminded the British workers of the struggle in South Africa, and the task of liberating the Native peoples there and elsewhere in the Empire”.[448] Meanwhile, the Committee excited Andrews’ “particular admiration”, and convinced him of the need to “organize the South African workers on similar lines”.[449] Upon his return he was hired by the ISL as a full-time organizer, in part in order to promote a local workers’ committee movement.[450] Andrews had some success in Witwatersrand engineering, rail and mines, but disappointingly, many of the local “Works Committees” thus established were not particularly radical. There was one critical exception, the Council of Action based on the mines, of which more below.

The ISL’s positions were frankly not very popular among white workers at this time. When it ran in elections, it was trounced by the other parties, and always lost its deposit. Its weekly public meetings in Johannesburg—held at the Market Square and at the City Hall steps— faced increasing mob violence from thugs like the Comrades of the Great War, a war veterans’ group. ISL activists faced a series of arrests and trials, many of which were overtly aimed at suppressing its propaganda. The white unions distanced themselves from the organization, while recruits from the SA Labor Party soon left over the “revolutionary platform regarding the native workers”.[451]

In 1917, the ISL was evicted from its offices in Trades Hall, the main union house, after it refused to accept a management order barring Africans from ISL facilities.[452] It moved to Neppe’s Buildings in Fox street, owned by a Jewish supporter, where it continued to produce the International, sell radical literature, house a radical library, run Socialist Sunday Schools, and hold meetings.

Immigrant Jews like Neppe played an increasingly important role, with a large and active (and fiercely anti-Zionist) “Yiddish-Speaking Branch” of the ISL formed in August 1917. This produced ISL materials in Yiddish, organized meetings in the multi-racial slums of Johannesburg where most of these immigrants lived, and ran a library and reading room in the Palmerston Hotel.[453] It established contacts in South West Africa, raised money for strikes, and played a key role in the acquisition of an ISL printing press in 1919.[454] Perhaps the most famous of the new recruits was Solly Sachs, a first-generation Latvian immigrant who led the Reef Shop Assistants union, and later played a prominent role in the CPSA.[455]

Black revolutionaries in the ISL

By this stage, the ISL had taken a leaf from the SDF book, and was consciously cultivating links with people of color, reasoning that “an internationalism which does not concede the fullest rights which the native working-class is capable of claiming will be a sham”.[456] It established its policy “as one of solidarity with Africans as fellow workers in common struggle”.[457] By 1918, had recruited a range of African, Colored and Indian members, and developed a record of working alongside radicals in the SANNC and APO.

An early recruit was T.W. Thibedi, an African schoolteacher who joined the International Socialist League after hearing a talk by Bunting in Johannesburg.[458] A brilliant man with a “genius at getting people together, whether workers in a particular industry, women, location residents, or whatever was needed at the moment”,[459] he had connections with the SANNC and lived in the Johannesburg slums in the 1910s. Thibedi was in later years a leader of the Federation of Non-European Trade Unions in the late 1920s, and a founder of the first African miners’ union in the 1930s.

In February 1916, an ISL meeting in Johannesburg protested the discriminatory 1913 Land Act,[460] the “first coming together in the Transvaal of white socialists and the African National Congress”.[461] It hosted the SANNC’s Robert Grendon at a meeting “with a large number of natives”, where (to “boisterous approval”) it was declared that the unions’ color bar must go.[462] Another talk condemned the “barbarities to which the Indians in Natal were treated”.[463]

In 1917, the ISL held a public protest against the Native Affairs Administration Bill, which subjected Africans to rule by decree of the Governor-General.[464] The meeting was “an historic occasion as socialists demonstrated for the first time on the Rand against racial legislation that did not directly affect whites”.[465] Then SANNC speakers shared the platform at the ISL’s 1917 May Day event, which was disrupted by white thugs—such attacks on ISL were now becoming a regular event.[466] In 1918, the ISL’s May Day celebrations took place in Ferreirastown, a mainly Colored area, the first time May Day in the Transvaal was “directed to non-European workers”.[467]

Having committed themselves publicly to the formation of unions among people of color, neglected by the existing unions, the ISL launched an Indian Workers’ Industrial Union “on the lines of the IWW” in Durban in March 1917.[468] This drew in workers in catering, on the docks and in laundry, printing, and tobacco, and linked up with Indian colliers and farm workers.[469] In conjunction with the local ISL, the union ran study classes—SLP materials featuring prominently—and held open air meetings where the “the Indian Workers Choir entertained the crowds by singing the Red Flag, the International and many IWW songs”.[470]

This was one of the very first Indian workers’ unions in Durban— possibly the first. It was initiated by Gordon Lee, a veteran white IWW organizer, and later the chair of the Durban ISL.[471] The ISL, however, stressed the importance of the union’s members electing a committee from their own ranks, which helped avoid paternalism as well as helped develop cadre among people of color. By August 1917, the union was being run by Sigamoney, R.K. Moodley and one Ramsamy, all of whom had a “good ... grip on the class struggle”;[472] they were all recruited to the ISL.

Sigamoney was “a committed socialist and a leading member of the ISL, and received fraternal support from trade-unionists and members of the same organization”.[473] Born in Durban, he was a school teacher; he now became the most prominent Indian union leader and anti-capitalist in the city. [474] In October 1917, for example, Sigamoney chaired a public debate on the use of elections, part of an ISL-initiated series to draw in local Coloreds and Indians; he was a featured speaker at the ISL’s January 1918 annual congress.[475]

A few months later, the ISL called a meeting at Neppe’s Buildings to “discuss matters of common interest between white and native workers”.[476] This launched a weekly night school for Africans, focusing on political economy and the necessity of the One Big Union, with the classes run by white ISL members. Sessions attracted around thirty regular students, mainly from the downtown Johannesburg slums, as well as the nearby mines of Village Deep and Crown.[477] Bunting, Dunbar and Gibson were prominent lecturers, stressing the ISL wanted to “make the natives who are the working-class of South Africa be organized and have rights as a white man”,[478] and desired that “all the workers black and white ... come together in a union and be organized together and fight against the capitalists and take them down from their ruling place”.

In September 1917, the classes were transformed into the Industrial Workers of Africa, explicitly modeled on the IWW.[479] “If we strike for everything”, Dunbar commented, “we can get everything ... If we can only spread the matter far and wide among the natives, we can easily unite”.[480]

As with the Durban initiative, the union was coordinated by a committee elected by the membership, and again, the key figures were recruited into the ISL. Besides Thibedi, African union leaders in the Industrial Workers of Africa included Ferd Cetiwe, educated at Qumbu in the Eastern Cape, who worked in Johannesburg as a picture framer’s assistant.[481] Cetiwe embraced ISL doctrines, and urged the union to “preach our gospel”: organize and “abolish the Capitalist-System”.[482] He worked closely with Hamilton Kraai, an ISL member educated at Peddie in the Eastern Cape, then working in Johannesburg as a foreman and a deliveryman.[483] Union literature in African languages like seSotho and isiZulu circulated across the Witwatersrand, including the compounds, and even moved with migrants to rural Rustenburg, Heilbron, and Cala.[484]

The Industrial Workers of Africa and the ISL also held discussions with the SANNC and APO. Sometimes this had an influence on the nationalists, as when Transvaal APO leader and unionist Talbot Williams wrote an IWW-style pamphlet on The Burning Question of Labor for Colored workers; this was published in APO and ISL editions.[485] Relations with the SANNC in Johannesburg were initially tense, some black syndicalists viewing the moderate nationalist body as representing “the men who organize rich and high people who are the men who suck our blood and sell us”.[486]

However, the Transvaal SANNC was undergoing a period of radicalization at the time, with the emergence of a radical wing opposed to the moderate leadership.[487] This wing was happy to work with— indeed, overlapped with—the Industrial Workers of Africa and ISL, with unionists like Cetiwe and Kraai playing a role in all three bodies. Moderate SANNC leaders therefore deplored the lamentable “spread among our people of the Johannesburg Socialists’ propaganda”,[488] and worried that “Socialism of the worst caliber is claiming our people”.[489]

The general strike movement of 1918

This was certainly demonstrated by the attempted African general strike of the July 1918. Earlier that year, 152 African municipal workers were sentenced to hard labor for striking, thereby breaching their contracts, which inflamed black Johannesburg. The SANNC, Industrial Workers of Africa and the ISL called a series of mass protests, attracting around a thousand people, sometimes more.[490] A joint action committee of all three bodies was formed, comprising the syndicalists along with sympathetic SANNC activists. After some planning, it proposed, to great acclaim by African crowds, a general strike on the Witwatersrand for the release of the sentenced workers, and a shilling-a-day pay rise for African workers.[491] The resolution was carried despite the opposition of SANNC moderates, who were shouted down by the crowd. The ISL’s T.P. Tinker proclaimed: “The strike was not for one shilling a day but for Africa which they deserved”.[492]

The strike was canceled at the last minute, although several thousand African miners came out anyway at three mines.[493] Eight people were then arrested for incitement to public violence.[494] Five were ISL members (Bunting, Cetiwe, H.C. Hanscombe, Kraai and Tinker), and a sixth was a member of both the Industrial Workers of Africa and the SANNC (J.D. Ngojo). The remaining two were the SANNC’s Thomas L. Mvabaza and Daniel Letanka, who had promoted the Industrial Workers of Africa and the strike movement in the SANNC paper Abantu-Batho (“The People”). The arrestees were, in short, hardly the gallery of “Congress leaders” portrayed in some works, since what they shared was a connection with the syndicalist movement.[495]

This was reputedly “the first time in South Africa” that “members of the European and Native races, in common cause united, were arrested and charged together for their political activities”.[496] The case collapsed, Cetiwe, Kraai and Hanscombe lost their jobs, and the Industrial Workers of Africa suffered a blow.[497] It was, however, soon reorganized by Thibedi with a “gratifyingly large attendance”.[498] Meanwhile, in March 1919, Cetiwe and Kraai played a leading role in a civil disobedience campaign against the pass laws, initiated by SANNC radicals. As Cetiwe said,[499]

These passes are main chains, enchaining us from all our rights. These passes are the chains chaining us in our employers’ yards, so that we cannot go about and see what we can do for ourselves ... It is the very same with a dog ...

The campaign led to nearly 700 arrests, and Bunting—who was acting on behalf of many defendants—was assaulted by white hooligans near the courthouse.[500]

Syndicalism in the Cape

In 1919, the ISL noted in Kimberley a “great awakening of industrial solidarity among the Colored workers ... a large portion of the community here”, and dispatched an organizer from Johannesburg, the Jewish tailor Sam Barlin.[501] Kimberley, like the Witwatersrand, operated a compound system for African miners, but the major part of its population was Colored and white. In sharp contrast to the booming gold mining towns and port cities, Kimberley declined rapidly in the new century: in 1911, its population stood at 20,953 whites, and 43,401 people of other races; by 1914, these figures had fallen to 14,888 and 25,755 respectively, and this trend continued into the 1930s.[502]

Barlin set up ISL offices adjacent to those of the SANNC and APO, and helped establish two syndicalist unions. One was the Clothing Workers’ Industrial Union, based among the several hundred local tailors—mainly Coloreds, with a smattering of Jews and Indians. Once again, the union was run by an elected committee, and once again, the leading figures were recruited to the ISL. Twenty-seven members, all Coloreds, joined the ISL, mostly from the big workshops of Myer Gordon, Reid and Brown. The most important recruit was Gomas, an apprentice tailor at Gordon’s, who later also played a key role in the CPSA.[503]

Within a few months, the Clothing Workers’ Industrial Union secured shopsteward recognition, the closed shop and wage increases, and spread to Johannesburg, and Durban. It waged, meanwhile, a successful strike to enforce its agreement with employers.[504] Barlin also helped form a Horse Drivers’ Union in Kimberley, based among the Coloreds who dominated the trade; most worked for the municipality and railways, often in refuse removal. These workers were not included in the recently formed Municipal Employes Association, representing whites. This union also provided ISL recruits, and was headed by local activists K.C. Fredericks and Jan C. Smuts.[505] It struck towards the end of 1919 for a 25 percent wage increase, winning after two tough weeks.[506]

Meanwhile, Cetiwe and Kraai left for the segregated African ghetto, Ndabeni, in Cape Town. They aimed to organize the Industrial Workers of Africa on the docks: these employed the largest single workforce in the city, as well as the majority of Africans. The union’s first Cape Town meeting was held on 10^th July 1919 in cooperation with the newly formed IndSL, in District Six. It was attended by “200 native and colored”, and the “speeches appeared to be the reverse of pacific”.[507] With “fresh members” enrolled, union offices were set up in Francis Street.

The IndSL, for its part, was a syndicalist breakaway from the SDF in May 1918: its members viewed the SDF as “too academic”.[508] It was initially driven by younger men, like C. Frank Glass, an English tailor, and A.Z. Berman, a Russian Jew, school teacher and businessman.[509] The IndSL program was the “abolition of the wage system and the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth based on the principle of self-governing industries, in which the workers will work and control the instruments of production, distribution and exchange for the benefit of the entire community”.[510] Its strategy was not “broadly” Marxist,[511] but centered on “building up that efficient organization commonly known as the One Big Union”.[512] Elections were seen as useless, even for propaganda. In any event the “big masses of the proletariat, natives and a big section of colored have no vote at all”.[513]

The IndSL was strongly orientated towards workers of color, with key militant Manuel Lopes stating bluntly that “propaganda among the colored and native workers is the work that counts”.[514] Craft unions and color bars played into the ruling class’ policy of “divide and rule”, based on irrational “patriotism, racial pride and nationalism”.[515] Real socialism “claims for every man, women or child, white or colored, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.[516] It advocated the “solidarity of labor irrespective of color or race”.[517] Like the ISL, its initial core consisted of white militants, but this too would change.

Its first headquarters were in Ayre Street, District Six, with a venue that could seat 600.[518] Detectives reported “considerable numbers of colored and native people” attending its functions, “the movement ... growing in numbers and importance”.[519] The IndSL was also in regular contact with visiting IWW sailors, who “taught the League to sing”.[520]

Later the IndSL moved to better facilities in Plein street in central Cape Town, where its new Socialist Hall was opened in early 1919 to a crowd of “between 300 and 400 persons”, despite heavy rain.[521] The audience was “chiefly Russian Jews and colored”; speakers included the fiery S.H. Davidoff (IndSL), Colored unionists linked to the IndSL like Brown, M.A. Gamiet and B. Kies, Harrison (SDF) and Boydell (SA Labor Party).[522] Open air events by the SDF and the League often attracted over 400 people at this time,[523] although the SDF was faring badly in the competition with the new body.

Between May 1919 and May 1920, the IndSL held an amazing 135 outdoor meetings and 32 indoor lectures, as well as innumerable “socials, lectures etc.”.[524] It was soon able to get “the services of a few colored and Malay comrades in our propaganda”.[525] Besides this, the IndSL ran a library, study groups, Socialist Sunday Schools and a Young Socialist Society, and published a monthly called The Bolshevik.[526]

In 1918, the Industrial Socialist League formed a syndicalist union among the African and Colored workers of the food processing factories in downtown Cape Town, like Hills factory and Buchanan’s.[527] The first meeting was held 10 September at its headquarters, and attended by 30 workers who resolved to “form an Industrial Union” and do “everything in its power to assure its success”.[528] Berman was the organizing secretary, and Kies the chair, of the new Sweets and Jam Workers’ Industrial Union, and the IndSL provided funds.[529]

Many African workers also joined, so the second meeting saw a “Com. Mpanpeni” acting as an interpreter, while “Com. Nodzandza” was elected to the largely Colored executive.[530] IndSL Meetings in the factory district attracted the ire of employers, with at least one meeting surrounded and stopped by a large police presence.[531] Meanwhile, the IndSL busied itself in the Cape Federation of Labor, where it had radical resolutions—like support for the Soviet Republic, and the “formation of Industrial Unions out of the existing Trade Unions”— passed at the 1920 and 1921 congresses,[532] although these were never implemented.

In December 1919 the IndSL worked closely with the Industrial Workers of Africa, which was embroiled in a major strike on the docks. The strike followed a joint meeting of the Industrial Workers of Africa, the ICU and the Cape Native Congress in Ndabeni, attended by 800 and chaired by Kraai.[533] It was Cetiwe who proposed the strike, and it was Cetiwe who, in the name of the Industrial Workers of Africa, sent the municipality the ultimatum: 10 shillings a day for unskilled workers, or strike action.[534]

Initially supported by the Cape Federation of Labor and NURHAS, the strike really rested on the Industrial Workers of Africa and the ICU, which held daily mass assemblies on the Grand Parade in the mornings, followed by evening meetings on Adderley Street.[535] Police and soldiers began to evict strikers from the Docks Location, another African ghetto, on Christmas Eve,[536] the unions squabbled, and the strike disintegrated. The two unions later held a joint meeting of 300 on the Grand Parade in March 1920.[537]

Echoes and legacies

Cetiwe and Kraai had tried to push the SANNC towards a policy of militant strike action at its annual congress in 1918, and repeated the performance at the congress of 1920. They were defeated, but the SANNC did resolve to support a general labor conference in Bloemfontein that year. The meeting drew in emerging unions from across the country, including the ICU and Industrial Workers of Africa, which resolved to merge under the ICU banner into “one great union of skilled and unskilled workers of South Africa, south of the Zambesi”.[538] Ultimately Clements Kadalie, the leader of the original ICU, established himself as the key ICU leader.

The reference to “one great union” was no mere rhetorical flourish: the ICU repeatedly invoked the vision of “abolishing the capitalist class” through one big strike, [539] devised a constitution based on that of the IWW,[540] and drew the ire of the CPSA for its “pronounced anarcho-syndicalist tendencies”.[541] It was far too eclectic, in fact, to be truly called syndicalist—Garveyism was a major influence, for example— but syndicalism was certainly part of its heady ideological mix. In the 1920s, the ICU would explode across the country with over 100,000 members, mainly African, at its height. Moreover, the ICU also spread into neighboring colonies, spreading elements of syndicalism even further afield.[542]

In the meantime, the ISL, SDF, IndSL and several other smaller groups would come together to launch the CPSA, supplying most of its key leaders; the International became the CPSA paper, and the ISL Press the CPSA press. Not surprisingly, even an official Party history concedes, “syndicalist concepts remained within the Communist Party for many years after its foundation; echoes of their approach and phraseology appear in many documents and journals”.[543] This lingering syndicalism was largely excised during the New Line period, which marked, in this sense, a major rupture in the party’s history.

The third echo of syndicalism in the 1920s was provided by the Council of Action, identified with Percy Fisher, Ernie Shaw and H. Spendiff, “desperate men—men who would stop at nothing”.[544] The Council advocated the formation of “revolutionary industrial units” and “a Republic of Industrial Workers”,[545] and briefly took control of the Rand Revolt, opposing racial clashes and challenging the state power. Fisher and Shaw died, apparent suicides, as troops stormed the insurrection’s headquarters in downtown Johannesburg.

In conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated that anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa consistently sought to address the national question. The anarchist and syndicalist movement was multiracial in composition, as well as internationalist in outlook, and was characterized throughout by a principled and distinctive opposition to racial discrimination and prejudice, with a commitment to interracial labor organizing and working class unity. Racial discrimination was lambasted as an outright evil, and racial prejudice as a profound threat to the working class. In its most developed form, the libertarians’ approach envisaged One Big Union as the means of constituting a common society based on class solidarity. This would be an Industrial Republic, not a nationstate, and form part of a universal human community, the International Industrial Republic.

This vision has been obscured by the misrepresentations of the preCPSA left practiced by the influential Communist school of labor and left history. It is fundamentally at odds with the two-stage strategy identified with the CPSA and SACP from 1928 onwards, which envisages the establishment of an independent, democratic and capitalist republic as a step towards a socialist order. This anarchist/syndicalist strategy assumes the necessity and desirability of delinking anti-colonial and class struggles, and tends to conflate national liberation with nationalism. From this perspective, it is perhaps unthinkable to Communist school writers that the pre-CPSA left may have had a sophisticated, perhaps even a viable, approach to the national question. If this is conceded, and if nationalism is therefore reduced to but one current in national liberation struggles, then much of the rationale for a two-stage theory falls away.

References cited in text