antifascism and working class strategies

[Rakesh Bhandari]

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