Aftermath of the Strike

In terms of its objectives the strike was a dismal failure, unable to be sustained by the tenuous AMWU organisation in the state repression. Not until 1949 was a further increase of 3d per shift granted, a far cry from a 10/- minimum wage, and still short of the recommendations of the 1944 Lansdown report. Yet the significance and results of the strike far transcend its failure. This large' strike in South African history (in terms of participants though not mandays lost undertaken by migrant workers. It was very workers on whose backs the edifice the cheap labour system rested, these supposedly still peasant migrants, whose action industrial sector spotlighted the erosion economic base of cheap labour and the shift in the basis of exploitation to relations of production within the capitalist mode itself. Recognising their proletarian role they a challenge to the system of exploitation far stronger than any hitherto offered by the political organisations of the African petty bourgeoisie. The structural conflict of the period 1930-45 culminated in the strike, which threw the problem of control into sharp relief, accentuating the growing debate over the future pattern of control. The violence of the response not only indicated the degree to which it felt threatened, but foreshadowed the extreme repression after 1948. There are also obvious parallels between this and the 1922 General strike of white workers. Both were revolts wage policy of the Chamber of Mines Smuts government supported. In both Smuts came down on the side of the mineowners with ruthless force and was thrown out of office in the following general election as a result of the contradictions highlighted by the strike. Only the war provided an equal catalyst in the politics of the Forties, and the strike prompted response from all classes.

By reflecting the structural changes since 1930, the strike immediately prompted desperate efforts by the U.P. government to defuse strident African demands for change. Groping for alternatives, Smuts offered to enlarge the Native Representative Council to 50 elected give it executive powers including taxation, and extend partial recognition to African trade unions. While there was general recognition within the United Party of the need to adjust the system of exploitation to the structural changes, there were substantial personal differences as to the desired extent of change (immediately after the strike Smuts had seen the need for modification while his liberal deputy Jan Hofmeyer stood on his dignity, apparently regarding the strike and the NRC suspension as insults to his good intentions). Moreover, given the class basis of the Party, important splits occured between fractions of the bourgeoisie over future policy. Smuts was faced with irreconcileables: the African demand for change; the response of key fractions of the bourgeoisie within his own party; and that of the electorate at large. The mine owners responded vigorously to the structural changes and the perceived threat to their interests. Accession to the strikers' demands or even movement towards them would have undermined the cheap labour system with only two possible results profits or a reduction in white wages. At a special meeting prompted to consider "the rising tide of working costs which is threatening the Industry and its future development", the Chamber claimed that a daily wage of 10/- would close 35 of the 45 existing mines, producing mass unemployment. The strike also directly prompt flood of Chamber public relations material setting out its position on African trade unionism (violently opposed), gold mining taxes (far too heavy - the Chamber was reluctant to "pay for" further industrialisation), migrant labour (beneficial to all parties) and general "Native Policy", as the Chamber flexed its considerable political muscle. In its evidence to the Fagan Commission, it argued that a switch from migratory to stabilized labour could only be offset by a drop in white wages, forbidden by law and which would meet with the "strenuous and bitter" opposition of organised white labour 57. Yet there was one important hesitant exception to this general Chamber consensus. American group appeared in some of its Chairman Sir Ernest Oppenheimer to favour the partial stabilisation of labour on the new Free State mines. Thanks largely to its control of the de Beers Diamond Consortium, Anglo was by far the most liquid of the mining houses and had secured the plums of the Free State gold fields. As the first of the mining houses to diversify out of purely mining activities into industry, its interests were more complex than that of the Chamber, and it is incorrect to view the Anglo response purely in terms of mining interest or "liberalism" 58. Its "more liberal" Position is directly related to the structure of its diversifying interest, and has played an important role in opposition politics in South Africa. Similarly, the strike forced businessmen in manufacturing and commerce into a re-examination of the system of exploitation, highlighting the tensions within the ruling class which had been building up since the end of the war. The fall in the Reserve contribution to the subsistence necessary for the reproduction of the labour power out pressure on wages, presenting capital with the problem of declining profit levels. The structural conflicts generated were distinctly unhealthy for business. By 1945, for non-Afrikaner secondary industry, the process primitive accumulation appeared to have reached a stage where direct state coercion and control of labour was no longer necessary. The huge expansion and increasing capital intensity of industry during the war accelerated the need for both skilled labour and higher productivity. Industry was prepared invest in both, and the migrant system with its attendant social and political costs appeared inconducive to both. After the strike, a move towards a stable, urban labour force advocated by the non-mining bourgeoisie and sections of the government. In a burst of effort rivalled only by the Public Relations Department of the Chamber of Mines, the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce ruminated publically on the state policy. Setting out a series of " steps designed to increase our, national product", it called primarily for increasing the productivity of labour", "which involved, "the elimination of interferences in the free market" such as "the traditional attitude which prevents certain classes of the population from making their full contribution to productivity", concluding, "we can allow sentiment or sectional interest economic policy, if we act in the belief we can afford it, we shall be sounding our death knell" 59. These issues had been officially raised during ­the war by the Report of the 1942 Smit Committee set up by Smuts to report informally on policy to improve the material welfare Africans. Dismissing the belief that the development of the Reserves would improve the situation, the Report condemn the gap between the earnings of migrant and urban labour; recommended both the recognition of African trade unions and preparation for of the pass system and urged vocational training scheme for urban Africans 60. In response need for skilled labour during the government training scheme for African artisans was established, and the possibility of Africans moving into skilled positions in large mooted. After the war, the Commission on Vocational and Technical training proposed free and compulsory education for all "non-European" children; the establishment of a national vocational training organization for "non-Europeans"; urged that Africans entering industry be trained in certain basic skills, and recommended " wherever a suitable occupational demand exists" polytechnics for the training of African artisans be established 61. The 1948 Fagan Report set out United Party proposals to reconcile "Native Policy" with changes in the structure of production, reflecting most-clearly the ambivalence of the U.P. position, caught between the demands of fraction bourgeoisie. All things to all men, it appeared to put another tentative nail nervously prepared coffin for migrant labour, yet recommended its continuation in the mining industry. Producing a welter of data, the Report conceded that the Reserves were overcrowded and impoverished, that the bulk of the African population had been permanently and irreversably urbanised. The foundation of Native policy, the "Stallard formula" which stipulated that Africans leave the urban areas when they "ceased to minister" to the needs of whites, was declared "an untenable proposition". The Report concluded in italics that "Legal provisions administrative policy calculated to perpetuate migratory labour and put obstacles way of its stabilisation are wrong and have a detrimental effect. The policy should be one for facilitating and encouraging stabilizing. On the other hand, migratory cannot be prohibited by law or terminated by administrative action." 62 Thus the strike highlighted the tensions in the ruling class and the policy choices open to the state, reflected most clearly in the Fagan Report. The manufacturing and commercial bourgeoisie wanted a stabilised labour force - to be financed largely by higher taxation of the Free State gold fields - whilst unless they could do the politically impossible and reduce white wages, the mine owners, with the possible exception of Anglo American, wanted the migrant system of cheap labour to continue and mining taxation reduced. Both groups were represented politically in the United Party, initially established in 1934 to unite warring fractions of the bourgeoisie, and the Party was torn both ways. Whereas in both the elections won previously it had been able to mobilise support on overriding issues - the crisis of capitalism in 1938, and the war in 1943 - not only had it been heavily deserted rural bourgeoisie on the war issue in 1939, but was now divided on key issue of national policy. In trying to have it both ways, the U.P. fell between two stools. On the other hand, by the once bitterly divided Herenigde (re-united) Nationalist party had no such problems apparently clear policy.

The structural changes highlighted by the strike put further pressure on the government. After the war, African influx into skilled positions was slowed by a number of factors, the first of which was large-scale, government immigration to South Africa. Where annual total had never previously exceeded 8 000 there was a net immigration of 20 922 whites in 1947, rising to 28 097 in 1948. More important was the re-absorption of 250 000 servicemen into the economy after the war. War measures 16 of 1940 and 38 of 1941 provided that men who left civil occupations to render military service, were to be reabsorbed into these at the end of the war, and could not be dismissed for six months. By the end of 1945, 45 020 whites and 7 316 Coloured had been reabsorbed under these measures. This both slowed the movement of Africans into skilled roles, and created tensions between black and white workers on the one hand, and predominantly Afrikaans-speaking, less skilled white workers and the state on the other. Industrial unrest amongst white workers rocketed after the war as they felt their carefully carved out niche of privilege, based on a rigid racial differentiation between skilled and unskilled, threatened. The number on strike rose from 1 521 in 1945 to 11 539 in 1946, to 22 264 the following year. The following manday loss rocketed from 6 039 to 58 554 to a massive 694 937 in 1947. This huge latter figure is explained by a stoppage of white building workers in protest at the government's training scheme for African bricklayers. The Nationalist Party capitalised on this discontent over labour policy and the distribution of surplus, concentrating its attention on the least skilled white workers precisely that group which, given the historical pattern of proletarianisation in South Africa, were predominantly Afrikaans-speaking. Nationalist unionists skillfully manipulated grassroots discontent with the South African Trades and Labour Council bureaucracies, dominated by more skilled, English-speaking workers. The Nationalist assault on the trade unions was explicitly designed to break the power of the SAT&LC and the Labour Party, reflected most clearly in the takeover of the Mine Worker's Union in 1947 and its subsequent disaffiliation from the T&LC 64.

Similarly, the Blankewerkers-beskermingsbond (literally the white workers' protection society) made considerable headway amongst other unions and the six working class constituencies captured by the Nationalists for the first time in 1948, were sufficient to put the party in power. Similarly, the two other Afrikaans-speaking groups, farmers and urban petty bourgeoisie reacted against these developments. The Afrikaner reaction is explained by their structural position in the economy. Although forming over 60% of the white population, in 1946 Afrikaans-speakers comprised 88% of unskilled white workers and 86% of farmers, but only 36% of professional and technical workers and less than 25% of administrative and executive workers, The share of Afrikaans-speakers in income from the private sector of the economy was only 24,8% in 1948/9, and only 9,6% if agriculture is excluded. The turnover of the 3 385 industrial establishments owned by Afrikaans-speakers in 1948/9 was a mere 6% of total manufacturing turnover, and Afrikaans-speakers' share in all other sectors except agriculture was equally low. If the period 1933-48 was one of pure bourgeois state power (the Labour Party having destroyed its ­ class basis in the Pact government) it was primarily the English-speaking industrial bourgeoisie which benefitted. The total of agricultural production increased 82% 1932-9 and 192% 1940-50, far short of the corresponding 140% and 246% increases in the value of manufacturing output 65. The prosperity of agriculture rested on active state intervention to secure labour and spread surplus. The network of labour controls, state marketing boards, extensive state credit and universally huge subsidies etc. were all vital to its continued solvency. Given the low of South African agriculture, farmers were unable to compete with the higher urban secured by Africans during the war, which, if coupled with the threatened erosion of the migrant labour system and relaxation of labour threatened their supply of labour. The apparent decision of the Smuts government to relax labour controls likewise threatened infant Afrikaner industrial and commercial capital, conceived early in the century and delivered by the midwifery of the Ekonomiese Volkskongres (people's economic congress) amidst much fanfare in 1939, where a coherent strategy for the growth of an exclusively Afrikaner capital was developed 66. For the aspirant capitalists in the professional groups which dominated the leadership of the N.P. the necessary capital for it to emerge as a fully fledged bourgeoisie depended on the high levels of surplus value provided by the cheap labour system and they resisted any move towards a stabilised higher wage force 67. For this group control of the state meant access to crucial resources, allowing it to enter capitalist competition at the stage of finance capital and in effect filter its ownership of the means of production downwards. The strike was perceived as a critical watershed event by Nationalist idealogues. The official 'organ of the Transvaal N.P. described it as "a direct result" and yet another of the fruits of" the government's racial and labour policies. More significantly, in a long series of articles in the extremely authoritative journal Inspan setting out the idea of Apartheid, the question -proletarianisation and its impact was seen central. Apartheid was here developed as the policy best able to cope with that proletarianisation, the dangers of which were "revealed by" the 1946 mine strike and the agitation for the recognition of the trade unions. The N.P, election manifesto concentrated these three Afrikaans-speaking class fractions through the intense manipulation of cultural symbols and hysterical racist emphasis on the "colour - question", which subsumed the fears of all three. Much was made of the U.P. ambivalence. N.P. propaganda stressed the party's dependence on the rural bourgeoisie and workers, emphasising its determination to expand the capitalist class and/reduce the dominance of mining in the economy 69. The victory of the Nationalist/ Afrikaner parties in 1948 must be seen as the reaction of these three groups - Afrikaans-speaking workers, farmers and petty bourgeoisie to developments in the social formation highlighted by the strike, focusing on labour policy and the distribution of surplus in and between classes. Following the withdrawal of Hertzog from the U.P. on the war issue in 1939, these class fractions had increasingly switched their support to Malan's Nationalists. In 1943, despite its opposition to the war the N.P. increased its share of seats from 27 to 43, and in 1948, on a minority vote, the N.P./A. P. coalition won a majority of 5 in the House of Assembly. The rural bourgeoisie were once again the largest group in class alliance. Yet the party was led and financed by professional men, the aspirant capitalists of the Reddingsdaadbond. One of the more dramatic features of South Africa's post -1948 growth has been the rise of Afrikaner capital under this group and the growing strains in the class alliance. The effect of the strike and its brutal suppression on African political groupings was as dramatic, and the direction of African opposition changed fundamentally. The patient expression of grievances by an elite in constitutional councils gave way to mass action and passive resistance. The unanimous decision of the Native Representative Council to suspend its sittings, together its unprecedented list of demands - abolition of the pass laws, recognition of African trade unions, repeal of the Urban Areas Act and direct African representation at all levels - gave an immediate indication of the changing nature of African opposition, and caught the government completely unawares. Comprised of the Union's most "respectable" Africans, the NRC represented primarily the chiefs and the petty bourgeoisie, precisely those groups which, concerned with the conditions for individual participation had insisted for so long on working reform within the system, refusing to countenance direct action. The language of the debate, the extent of the demands and the suspension itself were all unprecedented steps. A second immediate result of the strike was the trial of 53 trade union, ANC and CP officials for aiding and abbetting an illegal strike followed by the trial of the entire CP Central Executive Committee on sedition charges, eventually squashed in 1948. These trials were important in forging links between the largely white CP leadership and previously hostile members of Congress, producing a broad set of leadership contacts of vital importance in the non-racial Congress Alliance movement in the Fifties. Just as in white politics, the aftermath of the strike saw the merging of most elements of African opposition into a class alliance articulating a radical nationalism. The strike and the state's response illustrated the futility of the futility of the constitutional protest pursued for so long by the ANC, together with the considerable physical dangers of trade union membership. Whilst it was followed by the development of the ANC into a mass Nationalist movement, the purely class organisation and mobilisation of the proletariat which peaked in 1945 began to decline as proletarian discontent was increasingly channeled into political opposition within the ANC. By 1950 the Industrial Legislation Commission reported that 66 African unions had recently become defunct and total paid up membership of African unions had fallen to just 38,000. 70The development of this alliance reflected both the structural changes and the changing interests of its component classes vis-a-vis the state, highlighted by the strike. During the period under review the peasantry was proletarianised under the particular form of oppression maintained by the state. Growing African trade unionism during the war, culminating in the mine strike, brought this proletariat into direct confrontation with the repressive machinery of the state, which facilitated its exploitation. However, it was the changing interests of the African petty bourgeoisie vis-a-vis the state which made class alliance possible. Prior to 1936 the existence of the non-racial qualified franchise in the Cape placed this group in an ambiguous position. Not only was it a visible goal to e lements outside the Cape could did strive, but offered an avenue of access to state power and meant the petty bourgeois as oppressed as the proletariat. Before the abolition of the Cape franchise in 1936, the political organisations of the petty bourgeoisie concentrated on attempts to widen the avenue of mobility. With this closed, they were lumped together with the proletariat of a supposedly undifferentiated, exploitable supply of labour. With both their positions now ordered solely in terms of the division of labour and pattern of power, the partial conflict of interest was largely erased and a political alliance a possibility. This did not develop overnight however. It was delayed by freak conditions during the war with hints that the racial division of labour might be dissolved from above. Whilst the political alignments of the white classes made it impossible, this only really became apparent after the strike, when the movement towards an alliance began in earnest. For much of the period under review there was little contact or co-operation between the African trade union movement and the ANC. remained organisationally distinct, each separate membership, leadership and inters The war saw the slow convergence of inters and the beginnings of co-operation between the respective leaderships. The first breach in the rigid class bifurcation of African opposition since the Twenties occured with the formation of the AMWU in 1941, the ANC' s first tentative plunge into the deeper waters of labour organisation. Yet there-was also conflict, particularly over C.P. influence in the unions - and it was only after the '46 strike that the class divisions began to blur and a common leadership develop. With the virtual collapse of the trade union movement after 1946, prominent African trade unionists moved into important ANC leadership positions. The transformation of the ANC from the political organ of the petty bourgeoisie into the political movement of a class alliance did not simply occur mechanistically as an enlightened leadership immediately perceived where its interests lay. Rather, it was preceded by critical changes and much conflict within Congress itself. During the war the ANC had been moving away from its narrow base in the Thirties. There were however numerous constraints. Congress was subject to a wide, complex range of ideological pressures. The predominant Christian vision of non-racial justice together with the perception of the United States as the model for racial interdependence led to a conservatism in conflict with the eclectic radicalism resulting from Garveyite and C.P. influence. The I.C.U., the Joint Council Movement and the All African Convention all added to the matrix of influences on the movement. Its coherence and credibility was reduced by many personal and tribal rivalries. Founded in 1912 and still controlled by its founders in the Thirties, a degree of generational conflict developed, culminating in the effective takeover of Congress by its militant Youth League (CYL) in 1949. Centered in the Transvaal, the League's members had lived all their lives oppressive shadow of a single, national "Native policy", uninfluenced by the liberal "Cape Tradition". This was crucial as it was CYL members who first articulated the need for a class alliance (though in very different terms to that which actually emerged). The League was the first section in the Congress mainstream for whom the ideal of liberation lay in the future, with new, African inspired initiatives, rather than a return to a previous condition under white direction. As the influence of the CYL slowly moved the ANC petty bourgeois politicians into a more militant posture, the ideological and strategic emphasis shifted from the conditions for individual participation in the system to the liberation of the masses. The miners' strike and the government's reaction were the vital catalysts in changing attitudes of the established ANC and NRC Ieadership. The National Executive was enlarged in 1946, and for the first time since 1930, a number of C .P. members elected to it. Under the dual influence of the C.P. and CYL members, the ANC leadership began to accept the need for direct action in the form of passive resistance. Likewise, in the period immediately after the strike foundations were laid for co-operation between the various oppressed groups in a broad political struggle. In March 1947, the leaders of the ANC and the Transvaal and Natal Indian Congresses signed the Xuma-Naicker-Dadoo Pact, a six point agreement to work together for a universal franchise and the abolition of all forms of discrimination. The election of the N.P. government in May 1948 accelerated the radicalization process. At the 1949 National Congress, Dr Xuma was defeated for the presidency by the CYL candidate Dr Moroka and Congress adopted the "Program of Action". The basis of ANC policy in the Fifties, the Program emphasised the right to self-determination under the banner of African Nationalism, rejecting all forms of white leadership. Through the boycott of all discrimination institutions and the tactical use of civil disobedience strikes and non-cooperation, mass support was to be generated. The Program was implemented in the Defence Campaign of 1952, timed to coincide with the tercentenery celebrations of white settlement. This campaign in which 8 577 volunteers offered themselves for arrest sharply increased Congress membership which rose from an estimated 4 000 in 1949 to 7 000 just before the Defiance Campaign and then rocket to nearly 100 000 with many times that number of supporters.71

The period which began with a split in African opposition along class lines ended with a growing alliance between these forces. Despite the petty bourgeoisie nature of the ANC, its turn to the proletariat was inevitable. The CYL called for mass action and by 1946 the masses were no longer the peasantry in the Reserve but the urban proletariat. Lacking a strong bourgeoisie dynamic, Congress had to develop a popular base or collapse, and given the social effects of twenty years of development, this was essentially proletarian in character. The process of proletarianisation was accompanied by the growth of an increasingly militant proletarian opposition which effectively questioned the structure of the system of exploitation, culminating in the 1946 strike - the strongest challenge the system had received. The violence of the state's response indicated that neither the ANC's constitutionalism nor the "economic" opposition of the trade unions could confront it successfully on their own, pointing to need for a united political movement. Thereafter proletarian opposition was channeled is which was itself transformed by its new class basis and emerged from the Forties with a character very different from that with which it had enetered the decade. The trade union movement generated a class which the ANC could drop its giving itself a secure political base, and which reacted in turn on the growing national consciousness by the Youth League, raising it to an higher pitch. The African Nationalism and the goals expressed 1955 Freedom Charter were very different in tone to the anti-socialist, individualist Africanism" of the original CYL manifesto and early policy statements. Not only were they considerably more radical, displaying an enhanced concern with the material position of the proletariat, but showed an increasing awareness of the role of the capitalist mode of production in itself producing and reproducing the system of exploitation. Yet by the time ANC emerged at the head non-racial movement in the hands of another class alliance born out of these structural changes and determined to maintain a high rate of capital accumulation in order to consolidate Afrikaner capital, and suppress or shift the contradiction in the system of exploitation through repression. Fully aware of the dangers of united African political and economic mobilisation, this group acted ruthlessly to suppress them. The Fifties saw many legislative attacks on these organisation. Congress leaders were restricted an officials removed from office. Finally, on 8th April 1960, the ANC was declared an unlawful organisation and forced underground. I'll-prepared for the sudden shift from a highly visible legal movement to a clandestine organisation, many defeats during the following now functions largely as an exile movement.

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