Re: The Boer War

[Russell Grinker <grinker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Tahir: So much has been made of this one slogan! Do you even
>know how many times it was displayed and by how many people?
>The only reason why this slogan has been so often mentioned
>is because it is routinely quoted as a way of trying to
>discredit the CPSA. Are you saying that the strike of the
>white workers was not an anti-capitalist one?

My understanding is that it was "anti-capitalist" only insofar as it was in
opposition to attempts by British mining capital to reduce the relatively
privileged staus of white workers to that of the rest of the working class
on the mines.  It was a strike for the maintenance of racially-based lines
of demarcation and, while militant and violent, of the most narrow sectional
type.

Do
>contradictions amongst the people negate the fact that their
>struggle is essentially anti-capitalist? Do you know that
>these striking workers were bombed by the government and
>that the leaders went to the gallows? The racial form
>obscures the anti-capitalist essence here.

Yes, but the fact that they were treated so ruthlessly is not necessarily
evidence of the progressive nature of their politics but rather of the harsh
regime of those times.  If you can find it, read CPSA leader, Eddie Roux's
little book, Rebel Pity (don't know why it's called this).  In it Roux
explains in some detail the nature and genesis of white working class
politcs on the Rand.  While there were a number of radical sounding
political organisations bearing the names of British socialist and radical
groups of the time (Socialist Labour Party, ILP etc, etc) the reality was
that most of these structures were of the most narrow craft-based kind and
profoundly racist.  I think you could call them a hangover of the
organisations of the 19th century British labour aristocracy in the real
sense of the term.  Somebody should still do some work on the influence of
this kind of labourist politics on the development of the exclusivist racist
white working class politics of later periods.
>
>Lenin was only wrong in that the revolutionary ideology in
>SA, particularly its non-racial aspect, was only weakly
>developed at that time, and for that reason would not have
>resulted in successful revolution.

I believe that much of the politics of this layer of workers was in fact
profoundly reactionary - a hangover of the worst of the pro-imperialist
patriotic dregs of society who tried to lynch Lloyd George in Birminham in
an earlier period for his opposition to the Boer War.  He had to make his
escape from an anti-war meeting disguised as a woman.

But that it was an
>anti-capitalist revolt, and therefore indicative of a much
>broader resistance to capitalism surely cannot be doubted.


Oh but I do doubt it.  Lets not romanticise a political movement which was
the foundation of much of the nastiness to come.  You argue that it could
have gone the other way given the right leaderhsip.  Anything is of course
possible.  The reality was that almost all white working class organisations
in fact had a narrow, racist and sectional character.  Unfortunately the
best elements of the embryonic CPSA had very little influence over most of
these people.

Russell