Debates with the IBT on the National Question: South Africa

That the International Bolshevik Tendency is itself “adrift,” or clueless, so to speak, is exposed in a rather embarrassing manner in your article assessing the debate on the national question between our two organizations in Australia last year. In this article, titled “Spartacists Adrift” (3 September 2024), you treat the Democratic Party in the U.S. and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa as essentially the same. You write: “But when a party which makes no attempt to represent the working class as a class—a party like the Democrats in the United States or the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa—then that party is fundamentally bourgeois, and critical support or a vote in no way leads in the direction of class consciousness” (emphasis original). This, you say, is knowing “how to draw the class line.”

This, I say, is the utmost ignorance about South Africa, and frankly, a healthy dose of contempt toward the existing state of consciousness of a sizeable section of the black masses in South Africa. But most egregiously, it is a capitulation of scandalous proportions to U.S. imperialism. Just look at what Trump had to say about the EFF and its leader, Julius Malema, when Ramaphosa came to the White House a few months ago. More than any argument I can make, this shows exactly why statements such as yours are an outright absurdity. Any self-proclaimed Marxist group that equates a petty-bourgeois black nationalist party from South Africa that talks about land expropriations with the Democrats, one of two parties of U.S. imperialism and genocide, is never going to be taken seriously by anyone, let alone a black militant in South Africa.

The entire approach of the IBT, alongside those in the Spartacist family who cling to the past, is a perversion of permanent revolution. In the rest of this presentation, I will defend our reorientation on South Africa as the type of perspective necessary to advance the interests of the black masses, in opposition to our old and your current perspective, which has absolutely nothing revolutionary about it; in fact, it is an obstacle to the fight for Trotskyism in South Africa.

For National Liberation and Black Proletarian Power!

The founding issue of AmaBolsheviki Amnyama lays out our perspective for South Africa as follows:

Our general task in South Africa is to compete with the black nationalists for leadership of the black masses. How we apply this is a concrete question, which I will come to later in my presentation. But I want to elaborate on this point a bit further: what does it mean to fight for leadership and compete against the nationalists? For now, we will put the question of the size of our forces aside and consider the historic tasks confronting Trotskyists in South Africa.

To fight for leadership means to enter the fray, put forward a course of action that propels the struggle forward, and in the course of events show how the nationalists hold back this struggle and act as a constant brake on it, trampling on the aspirations of the masses. The key is that we can only expose how the nationalists are a brake through a class-independent strategy flowing from the historic interests of our class. If all we do is stand on the sidelines, write journalism about the bankruptcy of those who have the allegiance of the masses and make grand proclamations, we will convince no one. Why listen to the tiny Trotskyists when Malema today or Mandela then was able to rally millions?

What is the implication of rejecting this perspective of competing with the black nationalists? It helps to be concrete about South African politics. That the ANC today, after three decades of administering neo-apartheid and despite being hated by large layers of the population, is still in charge is due to the absence of a force that could put forward a perspective able to expose the vacillations of radical black nationalism and draw the lessons of the struggle against apartheid.

That for many years it was the EFF that posed the only serious challenge to the ANC is an expression of the lack of a force to fuse the struggle against national humiliation with the struggle for social development in opposition to white monopoly capital and imperialism. Instead of such a force, we have the emergence of yet another black nationalist party headed by Zuma, the MK. If revolutionary words were enough, comrades, we would not be in this state in a country where the energy of a most militant proletariat is being sapped by these misleaders.

But in what exactly consists the difference between old and new Spartacism? We understand that the task is to champion the national struggle and democratic demands, to be the most vociferous proponents of this just and legitimate cause while putting forward a class-independent perspective for their achievement. In other words, for proletarian leadership of democratic struggles. This approach is the only path that can fuse national and social liberation—the essence of the Trotskyist program.

You, on the other hand, while acknowledging that the “national struggle is key to revolution in the neocolonies,” dismiss the movement in deeds owing to its non-proletarian character or “bourgeois demands,” and in so doing stand aside from the movement, leaving the black nationalists in charge and thus undermining the struggle for revolution! This has nothing to do with the method of permanent revolution.

If the masses continue to be in thrall to petty-bourgeois leaders, such as the ANC then, or the EFF and MK today, then how will the communists use the national struggle to advance revolution? This is the key question: how to use the national struggle to advance revolution. I want to substantiate my claim by turning to how the old ICL and the organizations to come out of it rejected the fight for the Freedom Charter at the height of the struggle against apartheid.

Communists Should Have Fought to Implement the Freedom Charter!

The Freedom Charter is a radical democratic program adopted by the ANC in 1955, when it was turning toward radical populism following the coming to power of the apartheid government in 1948. The Charter advanced demands such as one person one vote, equality before the law, equal national rights for all groups, abolition of the color bar, an end to restrictions on land ownership on a racial basis, redivision of the land among those who work it, a national minimum wage and a 40-hour workweek, an end to child labor and much more. There is not one objectionable thing in the Freedom Charter, especially if you look at it from the point of view of black workers living under apartheid. These demands touched every aspect of their existence.

The old ICL tradition rejected the fight to implement the Freedom Charter based on the argument that it limits the proletariat to a bourgeois program and subordinates it to the nationalists. So, what we have is a declaration by the pure and principled Trotskyists that even though there is nothing wrong with the demands, they are nonetheless bourgeois and thus unsupportable because we are the “intransigent opponents” of the bourgeoisie. We will not fight for your Freedom Charter, say the Trotskyists to the black masses. Instead, we will fight for a socialist program. (What and when and how? That is another matter.) But we are with you in your national struggle and will await the day that it becomes the lever for revolution. (Again, how and when? We do not know.) This approach is utterly sterile from head to toe.

First, consider what it would take to implement the Freedom Charter: a struggle against the white bourgeoisie and the imperialists, which would itself show the limitations of the radical black nationalists in terms of their willingness and capacity to implement it. For the revolutionaries to refuse to wage this struggle ensured that the black nationalists remained in charge of the national and social aspirations of the black masses. It is this that ensured the political subordination of the proletariat to its bourgeoisie.

In contrast, if revolutionaries had championed the Freedom Struggle and at every turn pushed forward the struggle for its implementation, this would have shown how the nationalists are an obstacle and would have given the Trotskyists a real basis to fight for leadership of the national struggle on the basis of an independent program. The ANC did indeed betray. But no Marxist force was in a position to exploit this betrayal. As Trotsky explained in the Transitional Program: “It is impossible merely to reject the democratic programme; it is imperative that in the struggle the masses outgrow it.” The way for the masses to outgrow it is for a conscious force to demonstrate this in deeds, not by making sterile denunciations from the sidelines.

Gutting the Method of Lenin and Trotsky in Favor of Formalism

The other proof you cite of our degeneration is our critical support to the EFF in the last elections. Given that the IBT has not published an actual article laying out a developed critique of our position, I am basing myself on the remarks made by your comrades at the debate published in “Spartacists Adrift.” Again, these betray not only a cluelessness about class dynamics in South Africa but, crucially, an ultra-formalist approach to the question of the class line and the popular front. Incidentally, these two problems are not divorced from one another but are mere reflections of the same problem: rigidity that masquerades as Marxism.

On this question, you accuse us of burying the class line due to our supposed eagerness to tail nationalists. Your comrade notes, rather casually:

I want to pause here and just ask: Did any of you bother to look at what this “bourgeois program” was, what the balance of forces was, the mood of the black masses? What in your opinion was the class line in these elections? I would be surprised if you could even answer what was actually posed by these elections!

I want to lay out the concretes and our approach in order to impart to you the utter sterility of your orthodoxy. For the first time since 1994, the future of the Tripartite Alliance was in question. There was no independent force in the elections, and class struggle was, and remains, at an ebb. The right-wing DA and the radical populist EFF were contenders for an alliance with the ANC. The white bourgeoisie and imperialists had made crystal-clear that they would be against an EFF victory.

In the minds of workers, the choice was between more austerity in an alliance with the right-wing DA and the EFF’s radical version of the Freedom Charter. Objectively, the class line was between the radical demands of their Freedom Charter on the one hand and the forces that in one way or another promised to uphold or worsen the status quo.

The South African left cannot deal with the EFF, either ignoring it or being sucked into it. Furthermore, we are insignificant and this itself constitutes an important element in the situation into which we seek to intervene. In this concrete reality, we were confronted with the question of how to break the most advanced elements away from black nationalism and to the need for an independent working-class party.

So, we said vote EFF, they have supportable demands—for instance, the expropriation of South Africa’s land without compensation for equal redistribution and use; nationalization of mines, banks and other strategic sectors of the economy, without compensation; free quality healthcare, education, houses and sanitation, etc. Of course these are supportable! But we lay out exactly why the EFF cannot achieve these demands and why to be successful the struggle needs an alternative strategy, a strategy that we indeed provide! Instead of dealing with the substance of our political arguments, the high and mighty IBT dismisses this by saying “sure”—hardly an intelligent attempt. For you, the EFF is a bourgeois party, so any vote to it is a crime. Gone are the considerations of where the consciousness of workers is, what it would actually take to achieve those demands—i.e., a struggle against the entire social fabric of South African society. No. What is paramount is the realm of pure principles.

This is not Trotsky’s method but one of stupid ultraleftism. Here is what Trotsky had to say on the entry into the Guomindang in a 1 November 1937 letter to Harold Isaacs:

The popular front is not merely a formal organizational alliance or vote but the political liquidation of the proletarian program. The crime of the popular front is political subordination to alien forces. I ask the IBT: in what consists this political subordination? On what would you base your opposition to the seven pillars of the EFF’s Freedom Charter? Are you really so arrogant as to say to black workers in South Africa that land expropriation or nationalization of the mines is bourgeois and therefore not supportable? I would hope not.

But how bankrupt is the alternative, if you say these are supportable but we will not fight for these demands in action. That would be confusing and make you look silly. So what we did was to say yes, these are good, fight for these, but the EFF will not be able to achieve them and you need an alternative strategy. And we made actual political arguments to that effect and provided elements of a strategy to advance the struggle using class-struggle means. What is your political rebuttal to any of these? Nothing. All you have is formulas that you wave around like a talisman.

Comrades, there is an important distinction between a popular front that has been consummated, i.e., the Tripartite Alliance, and one that has not, i.e., the would-be alliance between the EFF and the ANC. The EFF has yet to betray the black masses. In the lead-up to the elections, Malema insisted that any bloc would be on the basis of the seven pillars, not on rejecting or gutting them. It is a question of who is the rider and who is the horse. Marxists must take these distinctions into account and not merely throw around red verbiage. If we ignore this point, then the October government of the Bolsheviks with the SRs would also be a popular front! Do you condemn the October government as a popular front, comrades?

Such are the implications of the old Spartacist approach to the national question. If you wish to claim this legacy, then, comrades, by all means it is yours. We do not want it.

In contrast to the other areas under discussion, a developed Spartacist line on South Africa emerged only in the 1990s, well after the period of revolutionary Spartacism. Even the degenerated ICL of the time remained capable of putting forward what we consider a respectable approximation of a program based in permanent revolution for South Africa.

But alongside the new program put forward in Spartacist No. 68, two ICL sections in non-imperialist countries, South Africa and Mexico, denounced all their previous writings and launched new journals with different names—in South Africa AmaBolsheviki Amnyama (The Black Bolshevik). And it is in the non-imperialist countries that the problems with your new orientation are most starkly revealed.

So, we don’t need to tell you that your program for South Africa has dramatically changed. What we do need to tell you is how wrong your new program is and how close it takes you to the nationalists you claim to oppose, involving capitulation to bourgeois nationalist forces and programs, despite all the rhetoric about building an independent working-class alternative to the nationalist leadership. You say:

You claim to want to break with nationalism, but your argument is that the road to socialism always lies through the national-democratic struggle, which you have determined in advance and in generalized terms is the “lever” or “motor force” for revolution. This is an essentially stagist conception that makes it difficult to distinguish yourselves from the nationalists, as we will see.

Marxists can and do raise democratic demands that nationalists will also raise. Some of those democratic demands will cut across imperialist oppression. In that sense, we may find ourselves in temporary, shifting blocs with bourgeois-nationalist forces—anti-imperialist “united fronts,” if you will. But we do not (as you have done) project some sort of strategic bloc with the bourgeoisie (“the anti-imperialist united front”) in which we can “expose” them by being more consistently “national liberationist” than they are. We insist that the real struggle is not national-democratic or even anti-imperialist but anti-capitalist—a class-struggle orientation that targets not just the imperialists but their bourgeois-nationalist lackeys in the non-imperialist countries. Depending on the context, that can put revolutionaries on a completely opposite track to national-democratic forces (for instance in Ukraine today where Ukrainian nationalism is more often than not used as a cover for support to Western imperialism).

Your political adaptation to nationalism in South Africa is revealed in the three principal criticisms you make of your past selves in your article “Spartacist South Africa Refounded” (AmaBolsheviki Amnyama No. 1).

The first charge is “rejecting the Freedom Charter.” It is absolutely true that the Freedom Charter is a concrete representation of the broken promises of the ANC, which bargained away most of its content in return for seats in government. We too call for nationalizations, redistribution of land, adequate healthcare, housing, jobs and schools, and for equality of all races within South Africa—none of which has been obtained under the ANC and its various bloc partners. But raising these demands is an entirely different thing from supporting this bourgeois programmatic document, which was written to carry out a national rather than social overthrow of the existing order, to enable the building of a cross-class coalition, and to lead the South African working class away from socialist revolution. This is how bourgeois nationalism works. We don’t want to “push [it] forward,” but to replace it with class struggle. The task of revolutionaries is to break any supportable concrete democratic and economic demands from the constraints of a bourgeois program or bourgeois organizations and present them as part of a transitional program for workers’ power.

As you say, the ANC has already betrayed the Freedom Charter. Do we need to go through that again? You may say that only a proletarian revolution could implement the Freedom Charter but what you are doing is preparing the working class to develop not the revolutionary socialist consciousness it requires to achieve its democratic and economic goals (ie, more than the Freedom Charter) but the nationalist-reformist consciousness that will ensure it fails to achieve them. This is not Trotskyism.

Secondly, you next denounce the old SSA for “opposing nation-building.”

It is worth looking at what the old SSA meant when they wrote a polemic against nation-building in the 1994 “Letter to the New Unity Movement,” published in the pamphlet Polemics on the South African Left. What the NUM meant by “nation-building” was a political project to forge South African blacks, belonging to various different intermingled sub-national peoples, into a new nation in the Leninist sense.

In practice this took the form of opposition to the rights of nations and peoples (in South Africa and elsewhere in the neocolonial world) to self-determination. The NUM opposed any form of federal or regional autonomy for the peoples of South Africa as a divide-and-conquer tactic akin to the Bantustans of the apartheid era. Indeed they articulate the construction of a South African black nation as the primary task of socialists in the country. They say: “anti-imperialism is not simply class struggle, but nation-class struggle. It means ‘We build a nation’.”

Against this, the old South African Spartacists advocated “the Leninist principle that overcoming national, racial and religious divisions among the toiling masses demands that the communist vanguard fight for the democratic rights and national equality of all peoples.” They advanced the traditional Leninist position, advocating the linguistic and cultural rights of minorities, support for national liberation struggles under certain conditions and the right to regional autonomy in a future worker’s state in South Africa as key components of forging unity among South African workers. It should be clear that the old SSA were in the right on this question. Revolutionaries must support the rights of national minorities against chauvinistic attempts to weld them together into a single people, which is what the NUM apparently meant by “nation-building.”

It is therefore startling when you come out in favor of nation-building, calling it “a just struggle” and demanding the fight for “a revolutionary proletarian leadership” of that nation-building project. No Leninist would be against the voluntary amalgamation of South Africa’s black peoples into a nation, but it is not a precondition for socialist revolution.

The most charitable interpretation here is that your South African section simply doesn’t understand what the old SSA was arguing against. Otherwise they are arguing for a pan-black unity project against the rights of South Africa’s national minorities. We remind you again what Lenin said: “Combat all national oppression? Yes, of course! Fight for any kind of national development, for ‘national culture’ in general?—Of course not” (“Critical Remarks on the National Question,” 1913).

Either way, it is clear that in your quest for nation-building you disappear the complexity of the national question within South Africa in a fog of generalizations. You fail not only to recognize the rights of different black minorities, such as the Zulu population in Natal, but also those of the Coloureds and Indians, distinct yet heterogeneous and class-divided populations that were designated as intermediate layers between blacks and whites in the apartheid racial hierarchy. The first issue of your new journal mentions the word Coloured exactly once. The second issue doesn’t refer to them at all.

What that one rather pro-forma mention of the word Coloured does is make it clear that when you use the word “black” you do not also include Coloureds and Indians, as is sometimes the habit of those who fight for the unity of the non-white population (Steve Biko for instance). Your “black liberation” and “black-centered workers’ government” disappears these other oppressed peoples. Your “nation building” is not Leninism but the opposite of the Bolsheviks’ nuanced approach to the national question related to the various oppressed groups within a country. As with Quebec, as with Ireland, your perspective of national liberation turns out to be a “positive” perspective of nation-building that downgrades the rights of workers from other minorities.

The third sin of the old SSA was apparently “dismissing the contradictions of black nationalism.” Instead, you say: “Only by grasping and sharpening these contradictions is it possible to expose this role and drive a wedge between the black masses and the petty-bourgeois nationalist tops.”

What strikes us here is the similarity of this language to the way that the Trotskyist movement, and occasionally yourselves, speak about social democracy. Bourgeois nationalism, for you, seems not really to be unambiguously bourgeois after all, but somehow expresses class contradictions—as might be seen in a bourgeois workers’ party.

You have collapsed the difference between working-class and bourgeois parties. The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is the archetypal radical bourgeois-nationalist party. You even compared it to the early ANC yourselves. So it still held some surprise when later that year you called to vote for it on the basis of the illusions of black workers in its program for land, jobs, and an end to load-shedding. You did this with no effort to justify it theoretically, as if it were the most natural thing in the world rather than overturning a century of Trotskyist principle. You’re not even embarrassed!

As Trotsky noted in referring to the Comintern’s disastrous support to the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang in China in the mid-1920s, to sow illusions in any promise or posturing from the party of an oppressed bourgeoisie is to give it: “...the opportunity (with our assistance) to dupe the workers and peasants, more efficiently, more easily, and more completely to throw sand in their eyes—until the first opportunity, such as was offered in Shanghai” (The Third International After Lenin, 1928).

The tactic of critical support for a social-democratic party can be used by communists to highlight the class contradictions between the working-class base of the party and its bourgeois program. However, the contradictions you seek to “expose” by voting for the EFF are within the bourgeois program of a bourgeois party. The lesson you are teaching workers is that there is no qualitative dividing line between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, since what really counts is not class struggle per se but pushing the democratic “national liberation” struggle to its logical conclusion.

We see how this happened. Of course Marxists will support struggles for land, jobs and an end to load shedding. You got involved in the entirely justified campaign to defend Xolani Khoza, but your new political framework does not give you the toolkit to carry out a bloc for action without also offering electoral support to your bloc partners. You have collapsed the fight for anti-racist demands as part of a transitional program into a generic call for taking leadership of “the struggle.”

You don’t use the phrase “black bourgeoisie,” but instead the generic term “black elites.” Notably you have also started identifying white capital in South Africa as straightforwardly an arm of US imperialism, while the black elite is merely its victim.

Which leads to the (meaningless at best) call to “Defend South Africa against Trump” (i.e., US imperialism) as part of a struggle for national liberation (Workers Vanguard No. 1185). South Africa is a neocolony, economically oppressed by imperialism but with legal autonomy since 1931 and republican independence from the British crown since 1961. Even if white capital were merely an extension of US imperialism, the black majority has governed the state since 1994. To remind you what Lenin wrote:

Self-determination, or national liberation, is a bourgeois-democratic political demand, already achieved by South Africa as a whole in relation to imperialism. If you want to argue that you mean full liberation from any form of imperialist oppression, then you are talking about proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat—precisely the struggle that your anti-imperialist united front and votes for bourgeois parties will sabotage.