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From The New International, Vol. XIII No. 7, September 1947, pp. 200–205.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The vital importance of the gold-mining industry to the whole economic structure of the Union and its relationship to imperialist domination has already been shown. What has to be described now are the conditions of existence of the 360,000 African mine workers on whose scarred backs the industry is built.
The irresistible pressure which drives the African reserve dweller from the reserves to toil in the mines has already been described. It is so great that it withstands all competition. It is not all, however, as the government lackeys describe it, solely economic, but is the essence of the whole art of government in South Africa.
Forced out of the starved, poverty-stricken reserves, the landless, denuded tribalist, unbearably burdened with unpayable debts and government taxes, is forced into the claws of his local trader-recruiter, who, for the sum of 24 shillings [1] per head for each recruit, paid by the Chamber of Mines, contracts him for a period of from nine to eighteen months to the Chamber of Mines. In addition to recruiting in the Union itself and in the High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, a traffic in human beings is carried on between the Chamber of Mines and the Portuguese government. The latter agreed in 1940 to supply a maximum of 100,000 workers to the Rand Gold Mines. For this “a fee of 1 pound [sterling] 14 shillings six pence [1] per native per annum is paid by the mines and a fee of 10 shillings [1] per annum is paid by each native to the Mozambique government.” (Native Mine Workers Commission, 1945, p. 4)
It is on the basis of these calculated business transactions in human lives and the semi-slavery of the recruited and contracted African mine labor that the Chamber of Mines secures its labor quota. But it is not only in recruitment that the African workers are handled as semi-slaves. Recruiting is only one aspect of the whole policy of migratory labor. This policy is designed to prevent the formation of a stable peasantry in the reserves and also to prevent the crystallization of a permanent proletariat in the mines and in the towns, which, footed in industry, could forcefully menace imperialist domination and its cheap labor policy. Migrant labor suspends the worker in perpetual thraldom between starvation in the reserves and slavery on the mines.
The cycle from the mines to the reserves and back again is endless for the African tribalist. Reaching the mines, the workers are all herded into tribal barracks and locked up and guarded from external intercourse by compound managers and guards. His only method of exit is by a special pass from the compound manager. During the period of contract in the mines he is completely cut off from his family in the reserve, which is left defenseless, denuded of a labor force and destitute, thereby increasing the servitude of both to the Chamber of Mines. Tribal differences and fights are deliberately encouraged to direct the revolutionary energies of the workers away from the Chamber of Mines. Their starvation wages are supplemented by specially prepared monotonous “hygienic” starvation rations. For the dangerous, health-destroying labor in the hot furnaces thousands of feet under the earth’s surface, they receive the magnificent sum of two shillings three pence per shift-one-tenth of what their European miner supervisors receive.
The Chamber of Mines has prohibited any trade union or political agitation among its workers. Its policy toward its African labor force is quite openly stated:
“The basis of the attitude of the gold mining industry to its native labor force is the principle of European trusteeship – the declared basis of South Africa’s national policy, as embodied in the Native Trust Acts. In accord with this principle, the industry, in the administration and organization of its huge native labor force, seeks to preserve all that is best in native tribal life. The organization of the compounds in which the natives live, has as its basis the pattern of tribal organization and discipline to which the natives are accustomed and from which they show little inclination to deviate.”
Therefore they outlaw all trade union organization, because, as they state: “Conflict between the allegiance demanded by a trade union and that owed to the tribe would tend to disrupt tribal life: a result diametrically opposed to a basic principle of national policy.” This statement puts quite baldly the incontrovertible policy of the Chamber of Mines, disclosing once more that the holy principle of trusteeship is the profane practice of barbaric exploitation and repression. Capitalism in its onset gained power by liberating the feudal serfs and dragged them out of their rural feudal sloth to become the modern working class. But in its palsied old age, capitalism, in the form of imperialism, can only hope to rule by perpetuating tribalism, i.e., basing its rule on the existence of the most primitive social organization belonging to the epoch of barbarism, which is in crying contradiction to the modern civilization.
Out of these harsh conditions of rule must spring sooner or later the harsh and exploding workers’ revolt. Indications of the grim nature of the struggle have already presented themselves. The most important and epoch-making of these was the five-day strike (August, 1946) of over 75,000 mine workers, who, organized in an illegal, persecuted and loose trade union, flared up in revolt against their unbearable conditions. This action called up immediately all the force of the state against them, but it was nevertheless the first and bloody beginning of the maturing class battles which will shake South Africa.
In this first encounter the miners were met by the full fury of the armed police detachments of the state, who clubbed, batoned, bayoneted and shot back the miners to their work. Many workers were killed, more than 1,200 seriously injured by police action. Most of the officials of the union were arrested and over 200 workers summarily arrested, fined and imprisoned. These facts demonstrate more clearly than a hundred indictments the murderous nature of imperialist rule on the gold mines of the Rand.
Imperialism would be best suited if the system of migratory labor could permeate every branch of its economy. Only through a migratory labor system can they hope to escape the subversive dangers pregnant in the centers of civilization, the swift and sweeping transformations which take place in the cities. A permanent, urbanized labor force would inexorably come face to face with the inescapable need for the formation of permanent centers of labor resistance, for the organization of trade unions, strikes, the compulsion to extend from the economic to the political field of struggle and thereby fundamentally imperil imperialist rule. From a permanent labor force concentrated in industry would spring the essential attributes of solidarity, cohesion and the realization of the power of labor in society. Thus a sharpened self-confidence and a realization of themselves as a class force able to oppose the masters of industry in permanent class warfare would be brought about.
These are the nightmares of horror that daily afflict the statesmen lackeys of the mines, farms and industries. Their treatment of urban Africans is aimed to stave off the Rood of permanent workers and to divert, restrict and control with the most brutally conceived methods the inevitable urbanization that must and does take place in response to each new call of industry and commerce. But in spite of the regimentation and control of labor through pass-laws, supervision, segregated locations, imprisonment of Africans for countless petty offense, the flood of urbanization and the revolutionary consequences borne with it cannot be stopped. Capitalist civilization is engulfing more and more of the former tribalists, breaking down the old traditions, breeding new generations of workers whose only loyalties and memories are of the town; contact in industry and locations has torn away ancient isolations, is unifying separate languages and creating a solid core of African resistance which will not oppose imperialist guns with assegais but will defy the imperialist of South Africa with weapons forged in their own arsenals and as an integral part of the revolutionary leader of modern society – the modern world proletariat.
The locks that hold back the permanent urbanization of the African masses are built in the brutal pattern of a segregation system which clutches the masses who reach the towns in the iron claws of police control, unskilled, lowly paid jobs, regimentation and complete denial of any democratic or human rights. They are hoarded into wretched tin hovels, separated like pariahs from the main European areas, in locations bound by iron fences – a cheap and plentiful labor reservoir for the European industrialists and their bloated families.
An African in the location is not allowed to own land or the dwelling in which he lives. His stay is regarded as coincidental with his job period in the factory. He is forced in his thousands to sub-tenancy, his housing needs deliberately ignored, as added discouragement to settling down in the town.
The ruling class consciously neglects the locations, in their attempts to force the African working class into a migratory existence. One-third of the urban population remains unhoused, to discourage settling down. But the only results of this death-dealing policy is misery, wretchedness and brutalized existence for the African urban population. The inevitable consequence of the policy is the increasing squatters’ movement of the African people. Over 70,000 people are at present squatting in several Hessian built camps in Johannesburg alone.
The Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 was the complement of the Land Act of 1913, and applies the policy of segregation to the urban areas.
“It is based on the principle that the urban area is a European area in which the native is permitted only in so far as he, speaking generally, serves the needs of the European and that as far as is practicable, separate areas must be set apart within the municipal boundaries for the residence of native people.” (Report of the Department of Native Affairs: 1935–36, p. 12)
This is a concise exposition of the real attitude of the ruling class to African urbanization. They allow Africans into their towns only when it serves the needs of the European population. As in the reserves, so in the towns, the Africans must bow down to the summary impositions of imperialism, in their living and working conditions. These impositions have given rise to certain outstanding features in urban African life.
1. Grinding Poverty, which is the keystone of African town life. “The committee has been impressed above all by the poverty of the native community. This poverty is a factor the ill-effects of which permeate the natives’ entire social life.”
The committee estimated seven pounds 10 shillings as the barest minimum on which an African family of five could live. But investigations into 35 industries showed that the adult male laborer earned on the average one pound three shillings nine pence per week, or five pounds two shillings eleven pence per month. Concretely, the poverty of the African people is expressed in an income which is far below the barest breadline level. However, when compared to the earnings of thirty pounds per month of the average European skilled worker, the average earning of the non-European more particularly, the African worker sinks into infinitesimal depths.
2. Control and Regimentation of African labor through pass laws. The pass system guards every movement of the African, watches over all his activities, limits and throttles his liberties and keeps eternal vigil on his numbers, whereabouts, place of work and reduces him thereby to a sub-human chattel at the mercy of the ruling class.
He is riddled with pass laws from the moment he enters the town. He needs a pass to stay in the town itself, to seek work, a monthly registered pass to show he is still working, an identification pass, a pass to enter a location, a curfew pass, a lodger’s pass, an annual poll tax receipt, and for the intelligentsia, a pass to show they are exempt from bearing passes. Failure to produce any of his passes at any time of night or day is a criminal offense punishable with imprisonment. The whole pass system has been described as a permanent system of martial law.
But the regimentation and martial law are not enough. Victims have to feel the sjambok of the police and to be continually reminded of white supremacy. Some 348,000 were arrested for contravention of the pass laws in the three years 1939–41, and in 318,858 of these cases convictions followed.
3. Police Terror is a daily phenomenon in the lives of the non-Europeans. One writer said:
“The pass laws, the urban areas legislation, the liquor laws and the like – these alone constitute an immense range of possible offenses, a range so broad that no African can be sure at any time that he is not committing an offense. I make bold to say that the legal position today is such that the police can arrest any African walking down the main streets of Johannesburg at any time of the day or night and any competent prosecutor would have no difficulty whatever in finding some offense with which he could be charged.”
Police raids for passes, tax, for the detection of illegal home brewing of liquor (particularly over week-ends), net over 2,000 people on the Rand alone. Periodic police drives take place such as those before the 1943 general election (European) when 10,000 Africans on the Rand were arrested in one week. According to the report of the director of prisons, in 1943, 207,096 persons were admitted into prison that year. There were 6,367 Europeans and 199,556 Africans and colored prisoners. The percentage of Europeans to European population was 0.28 per cent. The percentage of non-Europeans was 2.30 per cent. In the same year, convictions of Africans for all crimes and offenses was 544,397. Offenses against laws specially affecting Africans included:
|
Native Pass Laws |
.................... |
53,787 |
|
Illegal Liquor Possessors |
.................... |
100,093 |
|
Native Urban Areas Act |
.................... |
33,217 |
|
Native Taxation Act |
.................... |
21,435 |
|
Native Labor Regulation Act |
.................... |
20,546 |
A particularly vicious and criminal section of the Native Urban Areas Act (Section 29, formerly Section 17), lays down that
“All Africans who are unemployed or who have no sufficient honest means of livelihood can be arrested without a warrant and can be convicted to removal from an urban area or detained for a period not exceeding two years in a work colony or farm colony.”
This section is the apex of the immeasurable brutality which tears like a hurricane at the lives of the urban African and which condemns him, in or out of prison, to slave labor. Under this section, frequent police raids in the locations ferret out those who have been forced into unemployment by imperialism, or those who, escaping from the bleak horror of the reserves, cannot find jobs in the towns. All are caught in this police net to supply cheap convict farm labor.
Imperialism can only maintain its brutal system by organized and large-scale brutality.
Imperialism dams up the development of the African masses by denying them the elementary essentials of education. It fears that the millions of Calibans whom it controls, on being taught language, would used the knowledge to curse their ruling class masters. The educated African would not only curse his tormentors, but would develop the political ideology to overthrow them. This the ruling class well knows, and therefrom flows its segregatory policy of mass illiteracy.
Segregation extends its padlock’s to the young children, who are excluded by virtue of their color from attending European schools and who are begrudged the paltry allowances of 2 pounds 19 shillings 8 pence per educant given them. School attendance is compulsory for every European child up to the age of 16 years but the African children are left in the cruel arms of illiteracy. Seventy-two per cent of African children never attend school at all and of the 28 per cent who attend school, 75 per cent never go beyond primary grades.
The vast majority of adult Africans are completely illiterate. The net result is an ignorant and illiterate labor force, the essential prerequisite for their super-exploitation by imperialism.
The onslaught of imperialist oppression on the physique of the African tribalist has reduced him to a malnutritioned and diseased being.
In the towns “A recent survey of Natal school children in Durban showed that 40 per cent were suffering from clinical signs of malnutrition.” (Smit Report: Conditions in Urban Areas, p. 72) In Pretoria, 13 per cent of the boys and 60.69 per cent of the girls at school showed obvious signs of ill health and/or malnutrition. (Health Commission Report, 194?, p. 97)
Dr. G.W. Gale, venereal disease officer for the Union for 1939–42, stated in evidence before the Native Health Commission that the incidence among urban Africans is about 25–30 per cent of the population. Figures for tuberculosis, a disease associated with poverty and overcrowding, are unknown, but the most cautious report of the Commission for Public Health of 1943 states: “that in native areas tuberculosis is endemic and often runs a chronic course. With increased industrial development ... it is inevitable that many will develop tuberculosis in an active form.”
Regarding the infant mortality rate, “the consensus of opinion among medical officers of health and the evidence of several surveys is that the infant mortality rate is not less than 150 anywhere and in some areas is as high as 600 or 700.” (National Health Service Report, p. 95)
As a survey of the general health position of the non-European people, the following report of the superintendent of the Edward VIII Hospital for 1938–39 states:
“Nearly all native patients quite apart from the disease or injury for which they were admitted were undernourished. One can safely say that about half of them were grossly undernourished. Symptoms of pellagra and similar diseases were quite frequent and in children, conditions such as nutritional eodema were commonplace. A fair description for most of our patients admitted for any disease or injury would begin with the phrase ‘an undernourished native infested with intestinal parasites’.”
The solitary cause for this heavy toll of ill-health is not the intestinal parasites which are allowed to prey on the African’s life, but the imperialist parasite, which drains life and health from the African and non-European masses.
In the conditions of existence of the African people are expressed the most extreme forms of imperialist rule. But the impact of this rule strikes only with minor variations on the Indian and colored [2] groups. A description of the conditions of existence of these groups will show this clearly.
As for the 900,000 colored people, although their contact and blood is part of European society, the nature of their segregation, oppression and brutal treatment is more and more becoming the same as that of the African masses.
Almost half the colored people live in rural areas, mainly in the Cape province. Here the notorious “tot” system prevails, which “for the wine farmers ... is a means of disposing of part of their cheap surplus wine in the form of payment in kind ...” (Cape Colored Peoples, Marais) and the wretched and dulling conditions of labor are stunting and stupefying the colored rural population. The average wage of a farm laborer is 10 to 15 shillings per month. (Colored Commission Report, 1936.)
The urban colored worker is also thrust into the segregation jaws of the ruling class. He has special housing schemes in separate areas, etc. Poverty is the all-pervading and outstanding feature of his life.
In the towns the colored worker is slowly being stripped of his few privileges in industry. The white civilized labor policy has placed boulders in his way toward apprenticeship, has reduced the number of colored apprentices to insignificance. Only in the Cape, where they are concentrated, are the colored workers still permitted membership in white trade unions. Colored workers form over haJf the membership of the Cape Building Workers Union, the leather workers, furniture workers, wood workers and garment workers. All these unions have colored members on the Executive Councils.
But in the three other provinces, and gradually in the Cape too, the colored workers are no freer anywhere from the bonds of segregation than are the African masses.
Borderline literacy would perhaps best describe 70 per cent of the colored children at the Cape who attend schools. In any field, colored people are being swiftly degraded into the mire of complete segregation and hopelessness in which the African masses have been thrust.
The Indian population of the Union, now numbering some 250,000 people, came to South Africa in the 1860s as indentured laborers, to work on the sugar plantations of Natal. They came on the understanding that they would be allowed permanent residence and were guaranteed citizenship rights after their period of indenture had ended. But the imperialist ruling class forgot this guarantee soon enough. There are to date at least 65 different laws restricting the rights of Indians. These show conclusively the government policy of segregation and deprivation toward the Indian people. The Marketing and Unbeneficial Land Occupation Act, 1937, for example, gives the government extraordinary powers of land expropriation in rural areas; the Pegging Act of 1943 restricts their right of purchase; the Natal Housing Board Ordinance of 1945 consummates the program for residential segregation in that province.
The Indian population is not a homogeneous one. It consists of 195,000 people in Natal, mainly plantation laborers, 31,000 Indians in the Transvaal and 13,000 Indians in the Cape, all small hawkers, small traders and merchants. Indians are excluded from the Orange Free State.
The Indian merchant is feeling the blows of the predatory ruling class rained on his head, in their effort to exclude him from the sphere of business and land-ownership. The Indian worker has always been the exploited slave of the white ruling class. As the docile and cheap indentured immigrant from India, his slave labor on the sugar plantations of Natal built up the super-profits of the sugar industrialists.
The Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act of 1946 make it impossible for Indians to live in any other than segregated areas, locations where housing and health needs are cynically ignored and neglected by the ruling class. Already the bulk of the Indian homes in Natal are merely shacks, with a family in each room, with its terrible repercussions on sanitation, hygiene and health.
The inroads into the last remaining hopes of the Indian people are naked and ruthless. The policy of the imperialist ruling class is clear – deprivation of all remaining privileges and thrusting of the Indian masses into the merciless chains of the color bar, segregation and servitude.
Although divided from the non-European toilers by the rigid color-bar laws, which all help to give him a privileged and aristocratic position, the European worker suffers too under imperialist rule. First he suffers as a wage slave, and secondly his progress is thwarted by the segregation system.
In the category of European worker can be classified the highly protected and privileged skilled workers (engineers, builders, woodworkers, miners, etc.), with their high wages of seven to ten pounds a week, to the lower grade of unskilled poor whites, kept alive only by government aid, and victims of the segregation system.
The poor whites, numbering from 300,000 to 500,000, are a group consisting of by-owners (tenants on farms cast off in the process of capitalist development in agriculture degenerated into paid servants of European landowners), farm laborers, manual laborers on the railways and public works and in the industrialized cities unskilled workers, are all condemned to pauperized existence.
The dominating feature prevailing among all sections of the white working class is their infection with the ruling class ideology of white supremacy. Out of this ideology has arisen the brand of poor-whitism – a slur on a poverty-stricken section of the working class which is unknown anywhere else in the world (except in the South of the U.S.A.).
Instead of the “poor whites” uniting with the broad masses of non-European poverty-stricken toilers, with whom their real interests lie, the poor whites, victims of white civilization and white supremacy, fall easy prey to all the forces of chauvinism and reaction and remain sunken as a depressed section.
Economic slavery is iron-bound by political slavery. The outstanding feature of South Africa is the political domination of the imperialist bourgeoisie and the landowners over the non-European masses. The complete and closed monopoly of democratic rights and state power in the hands of the ruling class proves to be a machine-gun nest for them from which they shoot an incessant and blazing barrage on the non-European people. They deny even the most elementary democratic and human rights to the masses under their iron police heel.
While the African landowners call for the most naked and ruthless oppression, by the sjambok, the imperialist bourgeoisie, under the cruel and grim leadership of General Smuts, labeled with the philanthropic and Christian garb of trusteeship, crucifies the non-European people. Under the plea of helping to uplift the backward people toward civilization, they beat down with mailed fists and police power the demands and strivings of the non-European people for an end to their political serfdom.
Behind the bourgeois democratic parliamentary regime which exists for the 2½ million privileged Europeans is the brutal imperialist dictatorship rampant over a slave colony of non-European toilers. On the super-exploited labor of the slave colony rests the democracy of the European slave drivers. The giant locks permanently debarring the African, colored and Indian masses from democratic rights was officially written into the Constitution for the Union of South Africa in 1910. No non-European is allowed to sit in the Houses of Parliament. The Africans in the three Northern provinces are totally excluded from the voters’ roll. The colored and Indian males of the Cape could vote for parliamentary representatives of the Europeans. These rights, however, were soon either taken away or heavily cut down.
In 1936 the Representation of Natives Act which was finally to settle all the political aspects of the “native problem” completely abolished the right of a common roll for Europeans and non-Europeans in the Cape. Instead those Africans who had possessed the franchise were grouped into three electoral circles, each entitled to elect one white member of the House of Assembly. Finally the crown of misrepresentation – the Native Representative Council, consisting of 12 electoral units, was instituted, a fraudulent body, purely advisory, never listened to and a permanent and ragged symbol of the political slavery of the African masses. Four senators were also granted to them, to be indirectly elected by a system of electoral colleges, consisting of chiefs, who cast their votes in block for the people under their control, and the native advisory councils in urban areas and the electoral colleges in rural areas.
Only in the Cape are colored people and Indians represented on municipal councils, with the right to elect members of their own race. Though the influence of these concessions is negligible, these tiny privileges are being battered down. In 1930 when European women were enfranchised, the colored vote was reduced to a countless fraction. The conquering trustees legislate, administrate and control the political destiny of the non-European people. Instead of giving them democracy they have given them the Native Affairs Department, the Colored Affairs Council and the Indian Representation Bill (the latter bill provides that Indians may elect three Europeans to represent them in Parliament).
The Native Administration Act of 1927 is the most vicious anti-democratic act of the whole statute book, which gives the governor-general practically unfettered powers of legislature, by proclamation in regard to purely “native matters.” The Act gives explicit powers, under Section 28, and by executive action, to restrain the dissemination of “dangerous doctrine” among Africans, including the restriction of entry into African areas or removal from them. The governor-general may by proclamation imprison an African for three months without trial. Public meetings may be prohibited, restrictions exist at the discretion of the Minister in the freedom of the press. There is no habeas corpus for Africans. Wholesale arrests take place at any time without any writ from the magistrates.
That the African, particularly, and the non-European people as a whole, are considered as sub-human beasts, stripped of all human rights, is especially evident when the administration of justice is reviewed. There are two sets of laws in South Africa. One for Europeans and another, barbaric and brutal, for non-Europeans. The following occurrence is too frequent to bear much mention in South Africa.
“In July a farmer was charged in the Caroline Magistrates Court with culpable homicide, having murdered an African employee. His sentence: 50 pounds fine or six months’ hard labor, and in addition six months’ hard labor suspended for three months.”
In the rural areas the following is an almost daily occurrence: “In November, a native youth of 18 stole two fowls from a farmer and was sentenced by the assistant magistrate at Nylstroom to five months’ hard labor, not suspended.” In the Union of South Africa, the imperialist ruling class considers two fowls many times more valuable than the life of one non-European human being.
The Riotous Assemblies Act aims point-blank at any movement of the non-European masses for liberation, making it a criminal offense to agitate or struggle against the state by framing any such struggle as an “incitement to race hatred,” which is prohibited explicitly by the act. However, the prerogative of incitement to race hatred and race oppression rests only with the Smuts government and the Nationalist opposition. This act was also instantly applied in the strike of 50,000 African miners on the Rand, and ferreted out and dealt with all “agitators” and striking workers.
Although over 100,000 African workers are organized into trade unions, their organizations are still not officially recognized by the government. And the right to strike is illegal, mass arrests following the outbreak of any strike.
Imperialism has shackled the progressive development of South Africa by refusing to integrate the non-European people into the economic, political and social life of the country, and thereby chokes the economic forward thrust which would bring South Africa into the high road of industrial advance, and overcome its present abysmal economic poverty and backwardness and political slavery.
In place of an advanced capitalist development, carrying with it the mass of society as in America or Britain, the imperialist bourgeoisie has constructed a huge pyramid, at the apex of which is a highly developed capitalist structure modeled on the most advanced industrial techniques. But this high peak of capitalist industry rests on a broad base of cheap unskilled labor, hemmed in by a multitude of color-bar restrictions, the degradation of tribal idiocy in the reserves, the semi-serfdom and sjambok viciousness endured by agricultural laborers and the perpetuation of every form of racialistic filth, muck and reaction; all this in violent conflict with the highly developed imperialist peak.
A comparison of the productivity of labor and the national income of the advanced capitalist countries with the productivity of labor and the national income of South Africa will throw the backwardness and poverty of South Africa into sharp relief. For the period of 1925–34, Colin Clark (Conditions of Economic Progress) gives figures showing the following national incomes per head, expressed in international units: U.S.A. 1,381, Canada 1,337, New Zealand 1,202, Great Britain 1,069, Greece 397, Japan 353, Egypt 300–350, South Africa 276, India 200, China 120.
The Van Eck report estimated concretely that South African national income in 1942 was 370,000,000 pounds. This is approximately equal to 35 pounds per head of population. But the real figure is startling for, taking into consideration the tremendous cleavage in the way in which the national income is shared, the following is revealed:
These dry statistics expose the massive poverty of the Union's masses. The backwardness of the productive forces of South Africa is expressed in the fact that although 64 per cent of the total population is engaged in farming, this majority group produces only 12 per cent of the national income. This poverty and low productivity infest the whole of economic life. Non-European agriculture in its abysmal hopelessness has already been outlined. But even European agriculture, although subsidized by the state to the extent of over 7,000,000 pounds a year, protected and nursed, yields far below the average world capitalist standard.
The basic cause for this poor productivity is the substitution of cheap African human power for mechanization. According to the Industrial and Agricultural Requirements Commission, 8.4 Africans are employed to one European. But the African laborer remains a menial laborer all his life, debarred from learning the skilled agricultural jobs and is treated like a sub-human beast of burden.
Secondary industry, the barometer of economic development, was introduced into South Africa, through the back door, primarily to serve the interests of the gold mines. The steel, engineering, power, food and clothing factories were built to feed the gold mining industry. Therefore the development of secondary industry in the Union follows closely behind the development of the gold mines, and although industrialists compete with the Chamber of Mines for the African labor supply and dream hopefully of an internal market among the African masses, in the Union and even in Pan Africa, secondary industry is completely tied up with and in most important cases directly owned by the huge mining houses. It. is both unwilling and unable to pursue any opposition policy to the whole segregation structure of South Africa. A report of the Board of Trade and Industries clearly admits: “It is clear that gold mining has always been the dominant factor in the Union’s industrial development.”
Industry has, however, been given some leeway in its expansion. It, had the task of feeding the imperialist war machine and, freed temporarily from the pressure of British and American competition, it spread itself freely in a war boom over the South African market. From 1924–25 to 1942–43 the percentage contribution of manufacturing industry to the national income increased from 12.4 per cent to 19.4 per cent, surpassing the gold mines as the biggest contributor to the national income. In 1942–43 secondary industry employed 154,790 Europeans and 296,386 non-European workers. But behind even the present and temporary war boom lies the cold reality of industrial backwardness, expressed in the figures of the following international comparison of manufacturing industry (1936–37):
|
Country |
|
Gross Value |
Net Output |
Value of Land, |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Canada |
.................... |
1,038 |
446 |
1,130 |
|
New Zealand |
.................... |
1,099 |
352 |
720 |
|
Australia |
.................... |
862 |
339 |
470 |
|
South Africa |
.................... |
529 |
242 |
300 |
|
(Above figures indicate pounds sterling.) |
||||
Not only is South Africa industrially backward, but, as the table indicates, the low net output per worker and the low constant capital per worker invested in industry are apparent when compared with the other more advanced capitalist countries.
The reason for the inadequate and low mechanization of South African industry is the reduction of the non-European workers by law through the civilized labor policy to the position of permanently unskilled beasts of burden. Large-scale mechanization and modernization are not developed because there are cheap humans to supply their muscle power. The low productivity of non-European labor and its unskilled position in industry is the precondition for the continued domination of the secondary industrialists over the non-European people. But the main force impeding the industrial development of South Africa is the gold mining industry.
South Africa’s catastrophic backwardness and poverty are the result of the inability of imperialism to develop the tremendous human and industrial resources of this country. The rich mineral resources, such as iron and steam coal especially and limestone, asbestos, chrome and manganese, “... place the Union in the ranks with the limited number of countries in which the essential minerals for heavy industry are present in large quantities.” (Third Interim Report of Industrial and Agricultural Requirements Commission)
The main driving force for revolutionary change is the irreconcilable conflict between imperialist property relations, political and social structure and the unpostponable human needs of the vast masses. The colossal need of the productive forces is to have the segregationist stranglehold broken. The grip must be smashed, the system revolutionized in all its forms.
The main task is to liberate the human resources now chained in the segregationist prison for an industrial advance which will put an end to the tremendous poverty in town and country and set the non-European masses on the road to a new historical existence. Only the complete industrialization of the country will solve the immense needs of the masses for education, for acquiring technical skill and training for civilized amenities to advance toward and contribute to the rich cultural heritage of mankind. The non-European people of South Africa will redeem thereby their crushed personalities and thrust themselves in a forward march to full social emancipation.
But this industrial advance is impossible under imperialism. Revolutionary change for South Africa requires the destruction of the present system of land-holding, the release of the implacable pressure of imperialism on the reserves. It demands a redivision of the land in favor of the non-European toilers. It demands the creation of a stable peasantry, burst out of the shackles of the reserves, on land adequate to their needs, using modern industrial and scientific techniques to produce sufficient and more to feed the nation. It demands the creation of a free proletariat integrated as equals with the European working class in the task of developing the industrial productive forces, which alone can draw the masses into civilization. It demands the absolute throwing off of the political and economic ball and chain of imperialism. It demands a most resolute struggle for the complete annihilation of the segregationist system and the obsolete economic structure which it protects and maintains.
1. This is approximately $4.80 and $6.80 respectively, measured by 20 shillings to the South African pound, now quoted at about $4.03.
2. We believe the author distinguishes Africans from Chinese, etc., using the designation, colored, for the latter peoples. [Note by ETOL: “Colored” was the official designation of people of “mixed-race” origin.]
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Last updated on 24 June 2017