The Unresolved National Question in South Africa

Left Thought Under Apartheid And Beyond

Edward Webster, John Mawbey, Jeremy Cronin, Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo Mohubetswane Mashilo, Robert van Niekerk Niekerk, Luli Callinicos Callinicos, B G Brown, M P Giyose, H J Peterson, C A Thomas, A R Zinn, Siphamandla Zondi, T Dunbar Moodie, Enver Motala, Salim Vally, Gerhard Maré, Xolela Mangcu, S, Edward Webster, Edward Webster, Edward Webster, Edward Webster, Edward Webster, John Mawbey, Jeremy Cronin

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781776140244
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The re-emergence of debates on the decolonisation of knowledge has revived interest in the National Question, which began over a century ago and remains unresolved. Tensions that were suppressed and hidden in the past are now being openly debated. Despite this, the goal of one united nation living prosperously under a constitutional democracy remains elusive. This edited volume examines the way in which various strands of left thought have addressed the National Question, especially during the apartheid years, and goes on to discuss its relevance for South Africa today and in the future. Instead of imposing a particular understanding of the National Question, the editors identified a number of political traditions and allowed contributors the freedom to define the question as they believed appropriate – in other words, to explain what they thought was the Unresolved National Question. This has resulted in a rich tapestry of interweaving perceptions. The volume is structured in two parts. The first examines four foundational traditions: Marxism-Leninism (the Colonialism of a Special Type thesis); the Congress tradition; the Trotskyist tradition; and Africanism. The second part explores the various shifts in the debate from the 1960s onwards, and includes chapters on Afrikaner nationalism, ethnic issues, black consciousness, feminism, workerism and constitutionalism. The editors hope that by revisiting the debates not popularly known among the scholarly mainstream, this volume will become a catalyst for an enriched debate on our identity and our future.

CHAPTER

1

DECENTRING THE QUESTION OF RACE:
CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON COLONIALISM OF A SPECIAL TYPE

Jeremy Cronin and Alex Mohubetswane Mashilo

In much activist and academic discussion, the National Question tends to be dominated by matters of race, nationality, ethnicity and identity – not least in South Africa, and for obvious reasons. These emphases are not misplaced. ‘Race’ and especially racism, along with related issues like ethnic rivalries and xenophobia, continue to be burning concerns in contemporary South Africa. However, an overemphasis on race (that is, on one or another form of identity politics) coupled with the second word in the term ‘National Question’ might further suggest that essentially we are dealing here with a puzzle, the persistence perhaps of backward prejudices, resurgent and problematic ethnic identities, or ‘race relations’ that require delicate management. Several recent African National Congress (ANC) Strategy and Tactics documents travel in this direction.

All this might then encourage us to conceptualise the National Question as a matter of ‘false consciousness’ as is the case with a colour-blind, liberal humanism which states that ‘there is no such thing as race’ – which in bio-genetic terms is of course true. This in turn grounds other contemporary arguments about ‘irrational’ voter behaviour based on ‘identity’. The association of the National Question with false consciousness also occurs in various more left-leaning perspectives, one of which could be summarised thus: ‘Nationalism is inherently and ultimately a bourgeois trick to obscure class exploitation’. Or, as Benedict Anderson (1991) asserts, nations are ‘imagined communities’.

We do not intend to engage directly and in detail with the substantial South African and international literature that has dealt with these important issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, the concept of the nation, and the like.¹ Rather, we hope to shift somewhat the central focus of the discussion on the National Question. In doing this we are not entering into an old South African debate that surfaced in activist circles in the 1980s: ‘class versus race’. On the contrary, we are seeking to illustrate how the configuration of both class realities and racial/national identities have been shaped by the manner in which the capitalist political economy of South Africa has been (and remains) inserted within the global circuit of capitalist accumulation and reproduction. Although it is no longer relevant to describe the South African reality as ‘colonialism of a special type’ (CST), we will argue that critically re-examining the contested idea of CST can contribute to a better appreciation of the National Question. In shifting focus in this manner, we seek to illustrate that understanding the pre-1994 South African capitalist political economy as grounded in colonial-type articulations helps to clarify South Africa’s concrete specificity within a general world capitalist system. This, in turn, should contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities and challenges of advancing democratic, working-class and popular struggles.

A central thesis of this chapter is that CST and the political economy of South Africa are best understood as the interrelationship between two colonial-type core/periphery relations. The first is an external colonial relationship determining the semi-peripheral positioning of South Africa’s emergent monopoly capital sector. It involves South Africa’s incorporation into and subordination within the global imperialist accumulation chain, essentially as an exporter of primary commodities produced on the basis of super-exploited (cheap) labour. The second is an internal, racialised articulation between what was formerly an oppressed black majority and a white minority. This internal articulation was grounded through the first half of the twentieth century in what Harold Wolpe (1972) insightfully analysed as a core/periphery relation between two distinct modes of production.

These systemic features of South Africa’s political economy are the consequence of a complex history of domination and resistance in the wider context of the global expansion of capitalism. They include the relatively effective and prolonged resistance of pre-colonial African societies to colonial settlement. Despite the genocidal intent of much of the colonisation process, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of those living in South Africa were of indigenous African descent. (This is clearly an important specificity when compared to other areas of extensive European settlement in temperate zones of the New World.) Other early specificities of the South African reality were the Anglo-Boer War and the particular challenges of industrial mining requiring high levels of capital investment and significant quantities of low-paid manual labour. The ‘special’ in Colonialism of a Special Type should refer not so much to the mistaken notion of South Africa’s exceptionalism but, rather, to the specific features of its political economy within a general context.

COLONIALISM AND ITS VARIANTS

Colonialism in the capitalist epoch was first implanted into what later became South Africa in the mercantilist phase of expanding capitalism, with European settlement at the Cape under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company. A second, relatively distinct dimension of colonial settlement was the direct result of the advancing development of a new phase of capitalism – industrial capitalism, with its early epicentre in Britain. The great flows of European migration to the New World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were part of the solution to the dramatic expansion of a European relative surplus-population.² Much of this migration went to North America, Australasia and the temperate zones of Latin America. But some of it came to South Africa, with the 1820 British settlers an important early wave in this process.

These earlier colonial realities have affected modern South Africa in many profound ways. However, it was in a third phase of the global expansion of capitalism – its imperialist phase, dominated by monopoly finance capital – that the core systemic features of our contemporary political economy were laid down.

From a Marxist perspective, colonialism (in its imperialist stage) and its variants – semi-colonialism,³ settler colonialism, internal colonialism, colonialism of a special type and neocolonialism – all refer essentially to articulations of dominance/domination. This relational structure also has a spatial dimension (core/periphery) which is underpinned by a political economy involving the extraction of surplus (colonial or imperialist rent) by the core from the periphery. The latter may or may not be developed or partially modernised in this process of domination, but it is a skewed and essentially blocked development – that is, underdevelopment rather than simply no development.

In the capitalist era, these colonial-type relations are embedded in the nature of capitalist expansion and accumulation that invariably involves development and underdevelopment, or combined and uneven development. It is important to note that combined and uneven development is a generalised feature of capitalism, and does not apply only to those core/periphery relations that might be more usefully described as variants of colonialism.

There is no Chinese Wall between colonial and non-colonial instances of combined and uneven development. Colonial variants, we suggest, are characterised in the politico-ideological domain by two factors. First is the evocation of national/racial/ethnic identity and difference – although often in quite different ways – by both the hegemonic power bloc and the oppressed. The former may, for instance, invoke racial superiority, or manifest destiny, or a civilising mission; the latter may, as in South Africa, seek to overcome narrow ethnic identities with mobilisation and a discourse of a common African – or black – national identity. These identities are not pre-determined, nor are they stable. They draw upon a range of pre-existing realities (language, culture, geography, real or attributed human physical features, historical narratives and, above all, traditions of struggle) and articulate these into colonially oppressive identities (ethnic divide-and-rule strategies, for instance) and/or a national emancipatory discourse. How these identities consolidate is contested and is ultimately the product of struggle, including struggle within and between classes.

The second and more important politico-ideological factor which characterises colonial-type formations is the presence of colonial administrative apparatuses distinct from but articulated with the metropole state – the Raj in India or, in South Africa, separate Native (later Bantu) Affairs administrations plus – here comes the double articulation on which we will elaborate later – tribal authorities, bantustan administrations and a range of racially separate municipal black local authorities. In the case of so-called semi-colonialism (as in China), the distinct administrative apparatus may be centred on foreign concessions at strategic ports, bestowing on the foreign powers a choke-hold over the political economy of the interior. In the case of neocolonialism (post-independence Latin America is the classical case), the subordinate administrative apparatus might be a nominally independent national state characterised by deeply compradorist features, making it little more than a client state. The common factor in all of these cases is the existence of at least two distinct (and nationally/ethnically shaded) administrative apparatuses that reinforce the pattern of combined and uneven development.

Incidentally, the constitutional disappearance of racially distinct state apparatuses in post-1994 South Africa is one reason why we argue that the attribution of colonialism, or CST, or even neocolonialism to the current South African reality would be inaccurate. This is not to deny the existence of serious compradorist tendencies and dangers within the state and among the new political elite, but the post-1994 democratic state has a relative measure of autonomous capacity partly linked to the significant democratic majority that the ruling party still enjoys. It cannot simply be dismissed as a client state. However, this measure of sovereign capacity certainly needs to be used with a greater degree of strategic coherence and determination (and, indeed, patriotism) if the dangers of full-scale neocolonisation are to be avoided.

To anticipate the central theme of this chapter, we are trying to ground the argument that overcoming an apartheid legacy is not the unique challenge of the National Question in the present. At the heart of addressing our contemporary National Question is the struggle against a persisting and specific pattern of combined and uneven development that precedes apartheid, that was reproduced in new variations during apartheid, and which is being continuously and actively reproduced, and in some respects aggravated, in the present.

THE CPSA AND THE COLONIAL QUESTION

The National Question was first incorporated into the programmatic perspectives of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1929 with the adoption of the so-called Native Republic thesis (later often referred to as the Black Republic thesis). This was an endorsement of the line developed at the 6th Congress of the Communist International (CI, or Comintern) meeting in August and September 1928. More specifically, it meant acceptance of the resolution on ‘The South African Question’ emanating from the CI’s Executive Committee after the plenary congress. The resolution argued that the role of communists in South Africa was to work with the nascent national movements (the ANC was specifically mentioned). It called on the CPSA to adopt the ‘correct slogan ... for an independent native South African republic as a stage towards a workers’ and peasants’ republic with full, equal rights for all races’ (SACP, 1981: 94).

The CI resolution was hotly debated, and accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm or resignation by the CPSA national conference in 1929.⁴ In recent decades, the Black Republic thesis, the commitment to working with national liberation organisations, and the explicit two-stage-ism of the CI resolution have been the subject of considerable debate. Many commentators regard the Black Republic thesis as the original (Stalinist) sin of the Communist Party in South Africa, one which has marked and compromised its politics ever since (Bond, 2007; Harvey, 2014).

Although we certainly concur with the criticism of the rather mechanical stage-ism of the CI resolution, we believe that it contains seminal insights, and these require de-linking from any notion of stage-ism.

The opening paragraph of the CI’s Executive Committee resolution reads:

South Africa is a British Dominion of the colonial type. The development of relations of capitalist production has led to British imperialism carrying out the economic exploitation of the country with the participation of the white bourgeoisie of South Africa (British and Boer). Of course, this does not alter the general colonial character of the economy of South Africa, since British capital continues to occupy the principal economic positions in the country (banks, mining and industry), and since the South African bourgeoisie is equally interested in the merciless exploitation of the negro population (quoted in SACP, 1981: 91).

This is the passage that seeks to ground the new strategic line. Central to the argument that will be advanced here is the insistence by the Communist International on the colonial character of South Africa, notwithstanding the 1910 Union settlement, and notwithstanding the emergence of a ‘white bourgeoisie’. This formulation begins to lay the basis for understanding South Africa’s colonial character as resting on two interrelated processes of combined and uneven development – although this is not developed in the 1928 resolution. The important consequences of this double (‘external’ and ‘internal’) colonial-type articulation implicit in the Comintern resolution were obscured partly because of the controversy that the resolution triggered both within the CPSA at the time and continuously in broader debate ever since.

For a variety of reasons – notably, debilitating factionalism within the CPSA in the first half of the 1930s, and a major shift in the CI line to an anti-fascist popular front strategy in 1935 – the ‘colonial’ characterisation and the imperative of a national democratic struggle failed to receive any substantive theoretical development in the Communist Party’s programmatic perspectives for some decades.

THE SACP’S 1962 PROGRAMME AND THE CONCEPT OF CST

The next time in which colonialism and the National Question receive significant programmatic treatment in the Communist Party is with its 1962 programme, The Road to South African Freedom. It is in this programme that the concept of ‘colonialism of a special type’ is introduced in an extended section in the South African Communists Speak collection. South Africa, the 1962 programme asserts:

... is not a colony but an independent state. Yet masses of our people enjoy neither independence nor freedom. The conceding of independence to South Africa by Britain, in 1910, was not a victory over the forces of colonialism and imperialism. It was designed in the interests of imperialism. Power was transferred not into the hands of the masses of people of South Africa, but into the hands of the White minority alone. The evils of colonialism, insofar as the non-White majority was concerned, were perpetuated and reinforced. A new type of colonialism was developed, in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them (SACP, 1981: 299).

This return t...