of the white electorate, who voted the United Party back into power on a 110-seat majority in July 1943. The ANC, meanwhile, underwent a radicalisation following the confluence of a new militant Africanist nationalism under the stewardship of Anton Lembede and AP Mda, along with the increasing influence of trade unionism, the rise of civil disobedient squatter movements and boycotts of bus services.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE FREEDOM CHARTER
The account of how the Freedom Charter came to be conceived, how a ‘thoroughly bourgeois activist’ (Bernstein 1999: 145), ZK Matthews, came to propose this ‘radical’ charter in Stanger, how the document came to be assembled from scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes are all well known. In his account of it, Rusty Bernstein (1999), one of its drafters, along with Ben Turok and many others, makes two important points. The first relates to the way in which the charter had to reconcile what appeared to be quite irreconciable demands, reflecting the different strands within the ANC Alliance at the time. Thus, on economic policy, there were, among the scraps of paper in the tin trunk where they had been collected, demands for the nationalisation of mines and banks, alongside demands to end barriers to black private ownership and shareholding. Phraseology had to be employed creatively in an attempt to keep all sides happy, not always with success. Claims were made that the Communist Party influence ensured that the document had a socialist flavour and substance.
The reflections of Turok, a leading South African Communist Party (SACP) activist, on a 1953 clandestine meeting held at the factory of Julius First (a senior Party member) seems to support a non-interventionist Party influence in the strategic discussions on the Freedom Charter. The meeting was convened by Yusuf Dadoo, chairperson of the Central Committee of the SACP, with a group of seasoned communist activists, including Fred Carneson, Joe Slovo and Ruth First.
We met in the factory, in the shed. And there were fires – coal burners – around the table, because it was freezing cold. And Yusuf opened up with a sort of international perspective. And then Michael Harmel led and so on. Now, we [the SACP] had a document called the ‘Minimum Programme’.2 When I was asked to speak, I thought, what am I going to say? I think I was told that, well, the Party programme, the Minimum Programme, should be somehow a basis for the Freedom Charter. Now it’s not an instruction and I don’t remember how that happened. I’m not sure that I consciously said to myself or anybody else that the Freedom Charter must reflect the Minimum Programme of the Party. But I think that in my mind there was that, you see. So when I came up to the meeting, the meeting the day before, when I was presented with this reformist economic clause [of the Freedom Charter], I looked at it and I thought, no no no. This is not what I’m about. Now, whether that was in my head … or whether it was reflecting all the stuff I’d learnt in Europe, in England, in the Labour Party and all that, I can’t recall. And who knows how one’s consciousness works … But there’s no doubt that the independent policy-making of the Party influenced all of us. How much, and to what degree, what the mechanisms were, I don’t think I’m able to say. But it was there (Turok interview, 31 May 2014).
Bernstein (1999: 159) points out that ‘nationalisation is not necessarily a gateway to socialism’, making the example of the then nationalised railways and electricty supply, embedded within a system of white supremacy and gross economic injustice.
Bernstein’s second point, either missed or little appreciated by most commentators, including ourselves until now, is that, contrary to general belief among Congress activists, ‘debates over economic policy and the relative merits of capitalism and socialism were everyday stuff … The debate over the economic clauses of the Charter was not much more than an additional element in an ongoing debate’ (Bernstein 1999: 160).
In a revealing response to Niël Barnard (the apartheid-era head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service) and others who visited Mandela in prison, when asked about the nationalisation policy of the ANC, Mandela’s reply was that: ‘Nationalisation might occur for certain “monopoly” industries but that he had always considered [the Freedom Charter] a blueprint for African-style capitalism’ (Harvey 2001: 143). Of course, one has to remember his audience on this occasion. However, while some may stress the ‘capitalism’, we would point to the ‘African’ style; surely he had in mind a more collective, socialised form of economic organisation?
In Season of Hope, Alan Hirsch (2005) has pointed to a line in a 1956 article by Mandela, apparently supportive of the development of a black bourgeois class, in which he proposes that the ANC has always been a party of private enterprise, black business development and a market-oriented party. Rather than shifting to the right as some have suggested, the ANC was simply reverting to its pro-market, pro-private enterprise roots. We do not accept this argument. In our interpretation, Mandela’s 1956 article, published in the journal Liberation and reproduced by Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (1977), explicitly legitimates nationalisation of the wealth of the country, consistent with the provisions of the Freedom Charter. His arguments for a multi-class alliance led by working people to establish democratic governance in the interests of the whole society is perfectly consistent with a social democratic approach. Indeed, the stress on democracy is a characteristic feature of such an approach. Here are the relevant sections quoted in full:
The workers are the principal force upon which the democratic movement should rely, but to repel the savage onslaughts of the Nationalist Government and to develop the fight for democratic rights it is necessary that the other classes and groupings be joined … The cruel and inhuman manner with which they are treated, their dreadful poverty and economic misery, make them potential allies of the democratic movement. The Non-European traders and businessmen are also potential allies, for in hardly any other country in the world has the ruling class made conditions so extremely difficult for the rise of a Non-European middle class as in South Africa. The law of the country prohibits Non-Europeans from owning or possessing minerals. Their right to own and occupy land is very much restricted and circumscribed and it is virtually impossible for them to own factories and mills. Therefore, they are vitally interested in the liberation of the Non-European people for it is only by destroying white supremacy and through the emancipation of the Non-Europeans that they can prosper and develop as a class. To each of these classes and groups the struggle for democratic rights offers definite advantages. To every one of them the realisation of the demands embodied in the Charter would open a new career and vast opportunities for development and prosperity. These are the social forces whose alliance and unity will enable the democratic movement to vanquish the forces of reaction and win the democratic changes envisaged in the Charter (Mandela 1956: 7–8).
Turok responds to Hirsch by insisting that, while the ANC held some contradictory positions on this issue, it is wrong to claim that the ANC wanted ‘free rein’ for a bourgeois struggle. We will return to this point in chapter 4.
MASS-BASED POLITICAL MOBILISATION, NON-RACIALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER IN THE 1950S
This exclusionary Africanist position was to change with the 1952 Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws and the development of a non-racial political tradition under the newly emerging political leadership of Oliver Tambo and Mandela.
The mass politics of defiance in the 1950s increasingly brought into focus the dialectic of race and class – that is, the struggle to overcome national oppression was not reducible to a struggle against apartheid racism but had to confront the class relationships that reproduced inequality and underpinned racism. By implication, it had to confront the nature of the post-apartheid state and the post-apartheid society offered as an alternative to capitalism, as well as the repressive social exclusion associated with draconian apartheid legislation.
The ANC’s campaigning around rights of political citizenship became a primary focus of its political activities in the 1950s, with the specific concerns of social policy gradually subsumed under this primary political objective.
