Dauve, aka Barrot, wrote:
>Workers can be militant and racist at the same time.
>
>In 1922, South African bosses lowered white miners' wages and opened a number
>of jobs to blacks. ëWhiteí riots ended in a blood-bath: over 200 miners
>killed. As in strikes against female or foreign labour, this was
>wage-earners' self-defence at its worst.
This was not a wage earners' self defense in any sense. Duave's treatment is superficial, and hardly speaks to the depth of the problem. Let's be clear: It was a pogrom first and then a blood bath in which 233 were killed and 800wounded, on all sides of the triangle of forces: the "white" pogromists, the State and the African workers.
The capitalists tried to open some jobs up for blacks.
The "white" miners then struck. They forgot that the African miners had not taken advantage of their strike in July 1913 and unleashed a racist pogrom against African workers, shot them down, send commandos into locations and compounds , attacked them in sthe streets of Fordsburg, Ferreiratown and Vrededop, and murdered over an official 30. They made African workers stop work, go without wages and starve in order that they could maintain their dominant racist position in the mines. The strikers were supported quietly by the National Party leader, Hertzog, and the anti Semitic "Tielman Roos, his lieutenant in the Transvaal." Led by the Communist Party, the Joint Stike Committee and the Strike Commandos, the "White" miners held aloft the banner: 'Workers of the World, Fight and Unite for a White South Africa."
When the striek became an insurrection, the Communist Party called: "For a White Socialist South Africa" and declared the racist strike to be 'the most glorious event in the history of white civilization in South Africa...one of the most glorious episodes in the hisotry of the South African workers." Ivon Jones, in Moscow since Nov in 1920, pressed the Communist Intl to endorse this racist judgement.
Smuts stepped in on the side of the Chamber of Mines and using 20,000 tropps plice and burghers, machine guns and bombers, attacked the strikers at Fordsburg, Benoni, Boksburg, Brixton and Langlaagte.
Four strikers, Hull, Lewis, Long and Stassen were found guilty of murdering two Africans, and hung. Others were released under the 1922 Striek Condonation Act before May 1924 when the Nationalist Party won the next "white" election, with the support of the CPSA. WHen Kadalie's ICU demanded the hanging of the murderers of African workers, women and children, and the APO condemned what Abdurrahman called the 'bloodiest crimes,' the CPSA persuaded the 4th Congress of the Communist International on 23 November 1922 to pass a resolution, drafted by RADEK, denouncing the executions.
Source: Hosea Jaffe, European Colonial Despotism: A History of Oppression and Resistance in South Africa. (London: Karnak House, 1994)
Moreover, racism did work for white workers in South Africa. If Hillel Ticktin is correct, they were able to ascend out of the proletariat and ensure the equation between whiteness and supervisor, manager, foreman, etc. In that case there is serious case to be made for the mythology of the white proletariat.
By the way, Ticktin and Jaffe are both "white" trotyskists.
> The more open, global, potentially
>universal and therefore ëhumaní a demand or an action is, the least likely it
>is to be narrowed to sexist, xenophobic or racist lines.
It has become a banality to argue thse universal and global demands, when carefully inspected, are often nothing but those to which those who have power within the proletariat (skilled, white, unionized and men) will assent. The silences that such a demand for universalism can impose are guarantees that the labor movement will remain in the hands of reformist trade unionists who will sacrifice general proletarian upsurge to win compromises for themselves. Of course there is no more dramatic example than the above case.
Dauve thinks anti racism endangers institutional compromise. I think the danger is greater that anti anti racism creates the silencing mechanisms by which general proletariat upsurge can be quelled for the more powerful within the workers' movement. Of course I agree that the reduction of struggle to anti racism is divisive as well as a guarantee of isolation and defeat. In Beyond Ramps Marta R. makes such an eloquent argument against narrow politics of the disabled.
Plus anti anti racism plays into bourgeois morality about scarcity: there is simply not enough for there to anti racist and pro worker demands, it is implied. It's like trade union leaders agreeing to rationalise some of the workforce to maintain in good style the more senior workers who then get to appropriate the dignified mantle of working class. In such cases women, minorities and the unskilled are encouraged to stuff it for the greater interests of the working class and the union.
Why has so much of the left become exasperated with voices of the the more powerless groups within the working class? It seems to me that the Schlessinger crap about disuniting America and the massive campaign against so called political correctness has had great effect on the left.
Elsewhere in this article Dauve argues that the anti racist struggle for recognition of our racial unity as a species makes it impossible to challenge bourgeois promulgation of our class unity. Once we struggle for recognition of our biological unity--he suggests--we are defenseless against bourgeois humanist sentiment about our class unity.
This is a fantastic non sequitar. And Duave really seems to think anti racism is the rope by which the proletariat hangs itself; he's not preparing the working class to laugh off this non sequitar--he's warning the working class not be anti racist because it will then be hoisted by its own petard
This all belies a great insensitivity to how the common humanity of blacks in particular is insidiously compromised in many a way. For example, no matter how little one's heritage is black, one is completely black. One cannot be 1/8 black and 7/8 Italian; in that case one is just black. This suggests that blackness still puts one beyond the pale of common humanity--one can't be black and part of the rest of humanity. To think the fight for the recognition of what we inherit as a species--our biological unity--is to be dismissed because its logic may falsely imply capitulation to class compromise is to be insensitive to racism as well as laughably and perniciously incoherent.
Dauve also claims that he is against imperialism but not anti imperialist because that would require him to support national liberation movements. Yet this seems to suggest that he is anti imperialist in words but not deeds. For example, would he not fight against US bombings and sanctions on Iraq because this form of anti imperialism supports Saddam Hussein?
Many are now agreed that anti racism and most forms of identity politics grow out of capital's triumph; the left can now only voice minor grievances and push for small changes and more crumbs. The struggle over the future of capitalism itself has been taken off the agenda. There is much truth to this. But the focus (indeed obsession) of some of the left on the exaggerated divisive powers of anti racists, feminists, and gay liberationists also suggests a cowardice and intellectual incompetence to fight capital directly while instead hurling easy insults in this media blitzed environment against minorities, homosexuals and feminists.
In this sense Duave is completely correct. Our powerlessness manifests itself in racialized tension, instead of the latter explaining the former. But anti anti racism is surely no less to blame than the most hyperbolic forms of anti racism for the weakness of revolutionary forces.
>From my perspective, it's clear that anti anti racism is the bigger
problem. Here I agree with Charles against Duave.
yours, rakesh