It Could Happen Here - Anarchism Is South Africa ft. Andrew

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Andrew walks Mia through the oft forgotten history of anarchism is South Africa.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Good Appetit. I'm Andrew Siege of the YouTube channel Andrew Zone. I'm joined by...

Mia Wong, did not miss your cue this time. This will not make any sense to you unless you've heard the previous episode In which I missed my cue But, hello Indeed, indeed Welcome Did miss your cue So, recently I read Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

It was his memoir of his childhood in South Africa and politics aside he's a decent comedian and had me laughing out loud and thinking a lot as well and it really reignited my long-passing interest in South African history because he's given a lot of context when sharing his stories. So I decided to look into the history of anarchism in South Africa and that's what we will be exploring today. Much of the information I gathered is thanks to the scholarship of Lucien van der Walt, a South African anarchist and professor of sociology. Particularly I'll be looking at the work on anarchism and professor of sociology. Particularly, I'll be looking at the work on anarchism and syndicalism in southern Africa from the International Encyclopedia of Revolution

and Protest and anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and post-colonial world. Without getting into the lengthy and storied history of the region, I do need to provide some context. So we'll start in the mid-19th century, where the region that became South Africa was considered marginal to the world economy. You had the port of the Cape of Good Hope and Port Elizabeth, which handled mainly agricultural exports, and this was during the second period of the British Cape Colony's existence, after it had briefly fallen into the hands of the Batavian Republic during the Napoleonic Wars. None of that is particularly necessary to know

for our sake, but you know, little fun fact. At this point, once again under the British, the land was broadly agrarian, and Britain's farms were worked by coloured and African workers. and Britain's farms were worked by coloured and African workers. The neighbouring Natal colony, also under British rule, had its plantations worked by indentured Indians. The rest of the interior was under various Africana republics and African kingdoms. For those not in the know, so African in this context refers to, obviously, Africans, black Africans to be specific.

Indians referring to the indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent. Africanas referring to the Africans or Dutch speaking white South Africans. And then we have, of course, the British, you know white British people and the colored as a designation as a group as a self-identified ethnic group referred to the people of mixed European and African heritage that had begun to develop their own identity in their own community because the settlement of South Africa had started centuries before. So, other than the agricultural export and ports providing a respite for trade between

the West and the East, the Southern African colonies weren't particularly high up on anyone's list of priorities. But then the economic landscape of the region transformed with the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in 1867 and gold in Woodwater Strand in 1886. To make a very long story short, this led to the rapid centralization of mining activities and the growth of towns like Johannesburg, one of the most well-known towns in South Africa. Imperial interests intensified, resulting in the British wars on Africans and Afrikaners and the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, an extremely diverse and polyglot society under British rule. By 1913, almost half of the world's gold output came from the Witwatersrand area, and the Witwatersrand mines employed 195,000 Africans and 22,000 white workers.

The working class clearly faced many racial and ethnic divisions. It was primarily composed of various Africans, which had their own divisions between them, and there were also divisions between the largely skilled white immigrants from Europe and the largely unskilled local white Afrikaners. The marginalized African and colored middle classes that began to form from the few free laborers involved in various growing industries would come to lead early nationalist movements while grappling with segregation, discrimination, and linguistic challenges. As van der Waals said, and I quote,

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. Fast forward to the eve of apartheid in 1948 when Afrikaner nationalists took power and extended the segregation policies of the first four decades of the union even further, you get two responses to the national question preceding the development of apartheid from the organized labor crowd at the time.

The first response, known as white laborism, was associated with the mainstream white labor movement, leading back to the 19th century. of white laborism, and both organizations were born from the exclusiveness of early craft unions that later evolved into more pronounced racial exclusiveness. This white laborism approach combined social democracy with segregation, promoting job reservation and preferential employment for whites, urban segregation, and Asian repatriation. White power for white workers, basically. The other races can figure out their own deal, of course, on the reservations that we put them in. So it's no surprise that the apartheid government in part mainstreamed this white laborism movement.

But the second response to the national question was linked to the Communist Party of South Africa, the CPSA, from 1928, when it adopted the Native Republic thesis under pressure from the Communist International. This approach advocated for the establishment of an independent South African Native Republic as a precursor to the Workers' and Peasants' Republic, separating national liberation, specifically in the form of nationalism, and then socialism, into distinct stages. The CPSA initially considered leading both of these stages, but later abandoned this idea and opted for a united front with the African National Congress, aiming for a unitary, democratic, and capitalist state with land reform and partial nationalization. But there's a hidden history that goes unnoticed prior to the rise of apartheid and the CPSA. All the way back in the 1880s, Henry Glass played a pivotal role in establishing the local anarchist tradition in South Africa. He was an Englishman born in India with a background in radical London circles.

He moved to Port Elizabeth in the 1880s and engaged in various jobs, including working on the Whitwater Strand mines among African people. He contributed to the Cape Labour Press, translated key works by Kropotkin into English, and distributed anarchist materials through various organizations. Glass seems to have taken a good look at colonialism, saw how Africans were treated, and didn't shy away from calling it out. Now some of his writing did idealize pre-capitalist cultures, for example pointing out in a letter to Kropotkin that you can still find amongst them the principle of communism, but his main focus was on pointing fingers at an order

that treated Africans like second-class citizens, and going even further, to champion the idea of a working-class movement that bridged racial divides. He understood the foolishness of white workers to try and pursue their liberation alone while sidelining their colored comrades and though glass spent his time agitating in port elizabeth there was this was also perspective shared by the social democratic federation or sdf based in cape town which despite its name was all about pushing anarchism and syndicalism. Actually, let me be more precise. There was a dominant wing within the SDF of Cape Town that emphasized anarchism and syndicalism. There were also moderate and status elements in the SDF as well. Cape Town was quite different at that time from Port Elizabeth.

Port Elizabeth was mostly African and white, but Cape Town had a significant coloured population, which created a situation where much of Cape Town's working class was free labour, rather than bound to some form of slavery or indenture. Coloureds were facing growing official segregation and popular discrimination from the late 19th century onwards though, so there was a growing discontent as the working class fractured even further. But there was a key figure in the Cape Town SDF that pushed anarchism and syndicalism, and that was Wilfred Harrison, another friend of Kropotkin, a carpenter, a trade unionist, and an ex-soldier. He was known as a very dynamic speaker and a staunch anarchist communist who pushed for a future where workers owned and controlled everything.

With Harrison at the helm, the SDF set up shop in Adderley Street, where they were organising talks, events, and even standing in elections for propaganda purposes. The SDF's events attracted thousands, creating truly uniquely integrated public spheres that would bring coloureds, whites, and Africans in some of the same spaces. They were holding speeches in Afrikaans, which was the most popular language of the coloureds, and in Isinosa, the language of the Mosa people. They had bookshops, reading rooms, refreshment bars, beach trips, choirs, and even a few socialist christenings. At the various talks, they welcomed controversial figures, including a young Gandhi. Harrison's wing of the SDF further sought to

remove union colour bars, unionise coloureds, secure equal pay, and build unions that would unite all workers regardless of race. In the early 1900s, socialists in Whitwater's Round launched the Weekly Voice of Labour, led by Archie Crawford and Mary Fitzgerald. The paper served to connect socialists across cities from Durban to Kimberley to Cape Town to Johannesburg. Archie Crawford was a staunch anti-segregationist, pushing back against the South African Labour Party for its policies and organising the neglected coloured workers. In 1910, the SDF hosted British syndicalist Tom Mann, whose tours of the region would inspire the founding of the Socialist Labour Party, or SLP, in Johannesburg. They adopted the ideas of Daniel de Leon, the American leader of the

International Workers of the World, and were followed by the Industrial Workers Union, which linked with the IWW in Chicago. The IWW's ideas spread to Durban and Pretoria, but it was Johannesburg where they flexed their muscles with successful strikes and challenges to labor laws. The IWW's position carried the same as its forebears. Fight the class war with the aid of all workers, whether efficient or inefficient, skilled or unskilled, white or black.

IWW organizer Jock Campbell would be the first to specifically make propaganda amongst the African workers in which he was a strand. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

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But don't get me wrong. These efforts do not mean that they necessarily succeeded. The IWW and SLP's struggle to recruit to cross racial lines stems not primarily from prejudice, but from their overall weakness as union organizers outside the tram sector, where they saw the most successes. And of course, the practical challenges of organizing the predominantly unfree African workforce under Witwatersrand. So they talked a good talk about reaching across racial lines, but not to massive success, because they didn't have a strategy in place to actually establish those

connections between Africans, colored, and Indian workers. In this regard, actually, the SDF in Cape Town was a lot more successful. However, something did happen in Witwatersrand. In May 1913, a significant general strike erupted on Witwatersrand, initiated by white miners and quickly spreading across industries. The strike was marked by riots and gun battles, and escalated on what's called Black Saturday, July 5th, resulting in 25 deaths at the hands of the imperial troops. Subsequent strikes by African miners and Indian passive resistance campaigns further intensified the social unrest. But the failure of a compromise in the aftermath of the 1913 strike led to a second general

strike in January 1914. The state responded swiftly, declaring martial law, mobilizing forces, and suppressing the unions, resulting in the arrest and deportation of key activists, including Archie Crawford. Then World War I further disrupted things, with the country joining the British side. While some organizations suspended activities to support the war efforts, hardline Afrikaner nationalists launched an armed rebellion, leading to splits within the SDF and the South African Labour Party. Although anarchism and syndicalism played a role in these turbulent events,

the actual syndicalist movement on the Whitewater Strand was weak and divided by 1913. Despite attempts to forge unity through the United Socialist Party, it fell apart due to existing divisions and ideological differences among the constituent groups. part due to existing divisions and ideological differences among the constituent groups. While organized syndicalism struggled to lead the strikes, syndicalist ideas and slogans gained considerable traction in labor circles. The strikes and war issues reinvigorated existing anarchists and syndicalists, radicalized new activists, and sparked widespread interest in radical ideas, which would lead to a new development. In September 1915, the Industrial Socialist League, the ISL, emerged as a prominent syndicalist formation. Comprising of the syndicalist veterans and anti-war South African Labour Party activists, the ISL quickly became the largest left political group before the Communist Party of South Africa.

The ISL, rooted in the IWW tradition, advocated for the organization of workers on industrial lines, irrespective of race, and envisioned an integrated revolutionary one big union for national liberation and class struggle. liberation and class struggle. The ISL criticized white craft unions for their divisive practices and advocated for industrial unions to confront the challenges posed by giant corporations and trusts. Racial prejudice, according to the ISL, served the ruling class's interests, ensuring a steady supply of cheap, unorganized African labor. At the same time that the ISL was actively opposing discriminatory laws, the ISL also doubted the efficacy of African nationalist programs in genuinely emancipating the black masses. It contended that national oppression was rooted in capitalism, making

national liberation unlikely under the prevailing system. The ISL aimed to reform white unions while leading efforts to organize people of color. They faced challenges, of course, in the form of opposition from white workers, electoral defeats, and hostility from established unions. They were evicted from Trades Hall in 1917 for resisting discriminatory policies, but continued their activities, cultivating links with people of color, particularly through its passionately anti-Zionist Yiddish-speaking branch. The ISL played a pivotal role in establishing unions among people of color, launching the Indian Workers Industrial Union in Durban in 1917, and later, through night schools for Africans, initiating the Industrial Workers of Africa in the

same year, both of which would be led by their own constituents. In July 1918, there would be another general strike, this time primarily by Africans. Earlier that year, 152 African municipal workers were sentenced to hard labour for striking, leading to protests organised by the Industrial Workers of Africa, the International Socialist League, and the South Africa Native National Congress, the SANNC, which was the precursor to the currently ruling African National Congress, the ANC. The Joint Action Committee proposed a general strike on the Witwatersrand for the release of the sentence workers and better pay for African workers. Although the strike was cancelled last minute, several thousand African miners participated anyway, resulting in arrests for incitement

to public violence. The arrested individuals included ISL members and a member of both the Industrial Workers of Africa and the S.A.N.N.C. A year later, in March 1919, ISL members played a role in the civil disobedience campaign against past laws, which required non-whites in South Africa to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted white areas. That resistance campaign led to nearly 700 arrests. That same year in Kimberley, the ISL established syndicalist unions among colored workers, such as the Clothing Workers Industrial Union and the Horse Drivers Union. These unions achieved significant successes, including wage increases. In Cape Town, ISL members City Way and Cry aimed to organize the industrial workers of Africa on the docks. They collaborated with the Industrial Socialist League,

the INDSL, a syndicalist breakaway from the SDF, and played a role in the major strike on the docks in December 1919. Now the strike ultimately disintegrated, but it still marked a significant event. All in all, the ISL, heavily influenced by syndicalism, would play a major role in the strikes of the late 1910s. The ISL's influence extended to the formation of the Communist Party of South Africa, the CPSC, alongside the SDF and the IND-SL and a few other groups in the 1920s. That party would go underground after the Anti-Communist Act of the 50s and re-emerge as the South African Communist Party, the SACP. For most of its history, it has been explicitly Marxist-Leninist, heavily influenced by the Bolsheviks.

However, when it first started, syndicalist concepts still lingered within the party for many years before it was eventually excised. The internationalist and multiracial vision of the syndicalist movement was later taken over by the two-stage strategy of the CPSC-SACP, which sought to establish an independent, democratic, capitalist republic as a precursor to a socialist order. This, of course, diverges from the earlier anarchist and syndicalist strategy, which viewed the anti-colonial, independent, and class struggles as interconnected, and didn't see national liberation as solely the purview of nationalism. A view which, to me, is more sophisticated and revolutionary than this

one-track status view that Marxists tend to adopt, contrary to the organizing efforts of actual working-class people. Interestingly, van der Waal argues that while CPSA undeniably contributed to the working-class struggles since the 1940s, a critical look reveals that they made consistent caricatures of the pre-CPSA left. They sought to establish themselves as the true vanguard in the fight for South Africa's liberation. So they portrayed the pre-CPSA left in two main currents, the proto-Bolsheviks, considered true socialists, and everyone else. The pre-CPSA left was deemed a failure, with the proto-Bolsheviks credited for pioneering socialist work among black workers.

According to their narrative, it was only in the late 1920s, with the CPSA's adoption of the Native Republic thesis and Marxist-Leninist ideas, that the national question was adequately addressed. Psychism and syndicalism are portrayed as marginal and bothersome, predominantly white movements that, at best, underestimated the significance of national oppression or, at worst, endorsed white supremacy and segregation. This interpretation, of course, positions the CPSA-SACP as the sole bearers of a revolutionary socialist solution to the national question, while ironically erasing the history of early African socialist and syndicalist radicalism. So, wrapping up a bit here, we delved into the intricate history of anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa, uncovering a movement that played a significant role in Southern Africa from the 1880s to the 1920s, and consistently grappled

with the complexities of the national question. We've seen a multiracial and internationalist movement, marked by a steadfast opposition to racial discrimination and a commitment to interracial labour organisation and the unity of the working class. They had a vision of a society rooted in class solidarity, of an industrial republic, distinct from the conventional nation-state and in lockstep with an international industrial republic. Now, despite the decline of anarchism and syndicalism in the years following the founding of the CPSA-SACP, anarchism is still alive today in South Africa. The Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front, or ZACF, is a specific anarchist political

organization based in Johannesburg, South Africa and founded on May Day in 2003. The organization operates on an individual membership basis by invitation only, emphasizing theoretical and strategic unity among members. The Zabalazas align with the anarchist-communist, platformist, and especifista traditions within anarchism, subscribing to the idea of an active minority pushing anarchist ideas within larger movements. In fact, unlike the anarcho-syndicalists, the Zabulazas don't aim to build mass anarchist movements,

but rather to participate in existing social movements spreading anarchist principles within heterogeneous organizations. Zabalaza advocates for direct democracy, mutual aid, horizontalism, class combativeness, direct action, and class independence. It emerged during a time of political closure within trade unions, which were controlled by the African National Congress government. It oriented itself towards emerging social movements, such as the anti-privatization forum and the landless peoples movement, aiming to advance anarchist principles within these movements. Sablaz's work includes popular political education, combating reformist and authoritarian tendencies, and advocating for the independence of social movements from political parties and electoral politics.

So that's the story. The history of anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa. this is a summary, but it goes to show the influence that these movements have had in shaping the history of that often forgotten region of the world. Thanks for joining me. Once again, all power to all the people. Peace. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award.

Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards.