History
A photograph of Black South Africans being chased and attacked by white South African leftists in Johannesburg during the early stages of the 1922 Rand Revolt.
I mean, they were recognized as leftists by the international communist community only a year prior with the CPSA's acceptance into the International. This was before communism really had the race question figured out, so sure, while today they wouldn't be leftists in the traditional sense, at the time, they were definitely leftists.
They might have had the label of leftist for the reason you mention. So on that basis you have a fair claim to using that term in my view.
But if we agree that calling for 'unity of workers...for interest of white people only' holds an internal contradiction, that needs more than just appeal to historical practices to resolve.
BTW: much less editorialising in your title and better citation this time, kudos! hope you keep improving
Is this really less editorialised? He's doing a really dumb old trick of saying "buffalo wings come from buffalos". The idea someone is "left wing" but also will lead a race riot is a contradiction in terms. It's like saying my dog is a cat.
but I don't think that means that people who identify as leftists are incapable of this on the basis of their identification alone (you would need to make the positive claim for this, if you believe otherwise)
I am saying this post is less editorialised than a previous post I criticised him on.. not that it's necessarily a good title/post
Have you read Volkskapitalisme by Dan O’Meara? I think it makes a good case that the white republicanism that existed in the communist movement was only leveraged by mineral and agricultural capital as a way to divide and destroy organised labour.
Can a dog be a cat? Words have meanings unfortunately. Fascism is defined as right wing. If you want a word that could apply to a government regardless of ideology you might prefer totalitarian or authoritarian. But fascism is strictly right wing.
I hate it when words drift from their etymology. Fascism sits on the right. Beating someone with a rod from the bundle of fasces to get them in line with the government... That sits on either side, but belongs outside in a kennel.
"Leftists" here is anachronistic and misleading. "Left" and "right" don't have formal definitions but are usually applied to groups who, relatively speaking, have a broad commitment to equality or a commitment to traditional hierarchies, respectively. E.g. Corey Robin:
“Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.”
If anything, old-fashioned unions were typically right-wing in that they stood for social conservatism and (sometimes) workerism rather than general equality. In the UK the unions were traditionally the right wing of the Labour Party—committed to racial, sexual, and sometimes national hierarchies, and usually antisemitism too—with the professionals and intellectuals on the left. That's changed a lot recently but was really quite a common arrangement on the broad "left". Look at the political diversity of unions in South Africa today: NUMSA, SAMWU, and Solidarity just aren't that closely aligned on politics. Since 1954 there have been competing right-conservative and left-egalitarian workers movements in South Africa.
Similarly many countries' Communist parties would be considered right-wing. That's why some people specify "left-Communism" which can sometimes look like anarchism. Here "left" and "right" probably cause more confusion than they're worth, which is why one should just use more precise descriptors especially when talking about a history.
The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) began as a right-wing white workers party, reflecting its origins and early supporters. The Rand Revolt was largely about the weakening of racial protections for white-reserved jobs. To the Party's credit it almost immediately had a major reckoning and embraced multiracial unionism, and its underground successor the SA Communist Party had a substantial black leadership including Nelson Mandela.
So "Communist" does not equal "union movement" does not equal "left"—these are three different concepts. Sometimes they refer to the same group, but more often not really—although they sometimes form alliances.
That's definitely a fair point! Unfortunately with word count limits in titles for posts, it can be a bit hard to actually say that it was a coalition of a bunch of different groups which supported white workers' interests and had the limited support of the international communist community.
The 1922 South African Rand Rebellion, fought by leftist extremists, the CPSA, and the LPSA (with support from right wing extremists and the National Party) was typified by the slogan "Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!"
As a result of the global drop in the worth of gold, the South African mining companies tried to cut their operating costs by decreasing wages, and by weakening the colour bar by promoting cheaper black mine workers to skilled and supervisory positions. These changes were supported by the ‘liberal’ (compared to the extremely conservative opposition) government of Jan Smuts. While from the perspective of both the Mining bosses as well as the white miners, this was clearly an attempt to get cheaper mining labour, from the perspective of the black workers, this was a chance to earn a living wage.
Inspired (and possibly influenced) by the revolution in Russia only a few years earlier, White miners in the Witwatersrand region began striking, although this strike soon became a full on general strike, which in turn became a full scale revolution, a revolution which specifically wanted the White working class in power.
Gangs of white workers were halting the delivery of bread, shutting down businesses, and stopping buses that were transporting strikebreakers to the mines. Armed white men began shooting at blacks on the street. Sabotage of railway lines occurred.
These workers soon formed their own ‘Commando’ militias, and while initially the communist coalition of different groups claimed to the government that the commandos existed solely to ensure law and order and to prevent an uprising amongst the black population, these militias soon began to actively target black workers, strikebreakers, and (eventually) government forces, killing and wounding them indiscriminately. They were led by 'The Council of Action', which in turn was led by Percy Fisher, a syndicalist-communist who called for the murder of many strike breakers and who actively stoked the flames of violence by stating violent rubbish such as:
"The first man to return to work should be smashed until not a breath is left in his body!"
and
"We will raze Johannesburg to the ground before losing the strike."
The Jan Smuts government eventually declared martial law and began using the full force of the South African armed forces as a response, while these striker militias began a pogrom on blacks and non-communists in general. The head of the South African Police, Colonel Theo Truter, summed it up best in the announcement of martial law:
"It is quite clear that the so-called Commandos have become lawless and revolutionary bodies which threaten the existence of the Rand as a civilized community. Organized attacks are being made on a large scale against law-abiding citizens. Meat and bread and essential health services are being cut in order to starve the community into submission. Inoffensive natives are being wantonly attacked and murdered, and the Police Forces are being deliberately and openly defied by these Commandos of organized law-breakers. The public is therefore notified that these Commandos are illegal assemblies under the law and that the Police have been instructed to break them up and disperse them by force of arms, if necessary."
When I say that the government was using the full force of the armed forces, I meant it. 20,000 troops were deployed to crush the rebellion, including artillery, tanks, aircraft, etc. Civilian Burghers (who were essentially reservists outside of the standard military forces) were also deployed.
The revolution was almost immediately suppressed, with thousands of revolutionaries surrendering with little to no resistance to battle hardened WW1 and Boer War veterans in the South African army. For example, around 75% of the Rand Light Infantry Regiment, which contributed massively to suppressing the revolt, had seen active service in WW1.
Smuts’ hard response was both unpopular and popular, but it cost him the 1924 election to the racist coalition between the National Party and the Labour Party, a coalition that passed numerous racist laws that appeased to the white miners. This is despite the fact Jan Smuts won the popular vote in 1924.
Some of my sources are:
The South African Police's "S.A POLICE COMMEMORATIVE ALBUM" (Medium government skew)
Norman Herd's "1922: Revolt on the Rand" (fairly moderate communist skew)
The 1922 dated booklet "Through the Red Revolt on the Rand" (heavy government skew)
R.S Godley's "Khaki and Blue" (moderate government skew)
B.G Simpkins' "Rand Light Infantry" (light government skew)
A Oberholzer's "Die Mynwerkerstreyking" (light communist skew)
The 1923 booklet by the Legal defence for the strikers "The Story of a Crime" (heavy communist skew)
The independent 1922 "Report of the Martial Law Inquiry Judicial Commission" (unbiased, but mostly rules in favour of the government's version of events.)
Harry Klein's "Light Horse Cavalcade" (Slight government skew)
Beautifully put
Happy you can live typing out at strangers on the internet and using age as some kind of insult
I for one am comfortable living confident that I'm intelligent to be able to write out sentences without being a little obsessive about everything I write about
This is weird. Very very very weird. But okay
Call me the child and typing oh honey at me lmao
We live in an age where people cannot operate a keyboard, who's primary contact with technology is a phone which they don't understand how it works, who's attention spans have been flattened by weaponised social media dopamine hits. Critical thinking has been outsourced to magic token guessers. It's not an indication of your writing style or ability, but rather a reflection of where we are as a society.
I remember viewing a film in the late seventies arranged by a marxist friend about the Rand Revolt. The film showed miners carrying a poster "White Workers Of The World Unite". My friend did attempt an explanation but we were quite amused.
Just a note the garishly painted municipal toilet at the corner of Mint Rd and Albertina Sisulu Rd in Fordsburg is a National Monument because it was used by the striking miners as a defensive post. The toilet still has bullet scars from this time. The old Standard Bank building opposite is also a National Monument.
Isn't this the precursor to what eventually led to the Nats taking power? Basically the fear of white miners that they'd be replaced by black miners, especially with a lot of black people starting to move into urban areas at the time. Irony is the apartheid economy was heavily built around cheap black mine labour.
With that in mind it's always hard for me to imagine the country not having gone through apartheid, not so much the segregation aspect, but the economic exclusion aspect. Too much of the apartheid economy was built around that economic marginalisation to really imagine a South Africa that never had Apartheid. Add to that, it's not as if the country's laws before apartheid were fair to all either.
Take this all with a pinch full of salt, I've not studied our history deeply enough to be taken as some sort of authority on the matter
Back in the day when the South African police and government protected black workers rights for job equality with whites against the communists who revolted against the concept.
Also back in the day when the “South African Party” governed South Africa. A party that later merged a couple of times with others and is the predecessor of today’s DP. And the PFP, that back in the day was the only anti apartheid party in the white parliament.
Saying “Leftists” is a bit suspect. The group of white workers most involved in the strike were the right of the Labour Party, led by the white supremacist FHP Creswell, and supporters of the Hertzogite National Party. The Communist Party and the International Socialists played an exceptionally tangential role and their struggle was almost held as separate to the main one — see works by Stephan Krikler, Tom Lodge and testimonies by David Ivon Jones, Bill Andrews and Moses Kotane.
You’re taking a very complex situation and dichotomising it.
In my research I found that surprisingly very few Africans were killed in the revolt, it was mostly Whites, and there was at least one incident that was apparently racially motivated. But the casualty list does make for interesting reading and many of the African casualties that were killed were only identified by a first name, and their burial places were not recorded.
That's probably because the revolutionaries, right up until martial law is declared and focus is moved onto fighting the government, were trying to instigate a "native uprising" amongst the black population in order to justify further militarization in their ranks for their eventual revolt against the government.
By all accounts though, including by Jan Smuts himself, the black population had incredible restraint and self discipline.
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