Seventy years ago on 26 June 1955 around three thousand people assembled in a field in Kliptown, just outside Johannesburg. They were gathered to debate what the alternative should be to the apartheid system of institutionalised racial segregation, which had been inaugurated following the victory of the National Party in the whites only South African election of 1948.
This was the Congress of the People, organised by the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU) and others. Delegates had been elected from across the country, travelling by train, bus or on foot to, in the words of the prominent black academic ZK Matthews, ‘draw up a Freedom Charter for the democratic South Africa of the future’.
The following article by WEIZMANN HAMILTON of the Marxist Workers Party, the South African section of the CWI, explains how the working-class masses viewed the aspirations for a new society contained in the Charter: a challenge to capitalism itself, not just its then structural form of apartheid.
But the ambiguity of the Charter’s wording, not accidentally omitting a commitment to socialism, provided sufficient camouflage for the aspirant capitalist interests within the liberation movement to assert their own interpretation. With the consequence that when the racist regime was eventually overthrown a new class apartheid emerged under the ANC’s banner, with South Africa today now the most unequal country in the world.
This article has been abridged from a fuller version, available at https://marxistworkersparty.org.za
The ANC has always portrayed itself from its foundation in 1912 as a multi-class party with the leadership insisting that, whilst it was biased towards the poor, it represents equally the interests of all South Africans, rich and poor, white and black, workers, professionals, petty bourgeois, capitalists, liberals, democrats and revolutionaries. The composition of the 1955 Congress of the People held in Kliptown reflected this. In fact, astonishingly, even the National Party, architects of the recently introduced apartheid system, was invited but declined to attend. They preferred not to participate in a charade of political ‘happy families’, concentrating their efforts instead on the more serious business of trying to sabotage the Congress. The Congress was a convention of conflicting class interests and competing ideologies with no prospect of it emerging with a Charter that spoke unambiguously in the name of the working class.
Thus the Charter included nationalisation clauses but not a word either about capitalism or socialism. The leadership genuinely believed for a long period that nationalisation was essential if the aspirant black capitalist class was to take control of the commanding heights of the economy. Its vision was of a capitalist economy in which the black capitalist class would occupy at its summits a position corresponding to the weight of the black population in society. Freedom for the aspirant black capitalist class meant a predominantly black capitalist class instead of one dominated by a white minority.
The contradictions in the contributions, and the fierce debates that raged at the Congress, were rooted in the opposing class positions from which the worker delegates and the capitalist delegates approached the nature and tasks of the struggle.
How worker delegates saw the Charter
The Congress of the People provided the first opportunity for testing the balance of power in the relationship between the black working class and the petty bourgeois leadership of the ANC since the ANC had turned to the masses for support in the struggle against apartheid. Despite the common opposition to apartheid, the process of drafting the Charter revealed the conflicting aspirations of the different classes at the congress. ANC leader Ben Turok, who was responsible for the economic clauses, confirmed that the process was controversial with many delegates feeling that the Charter was not radical enough.
Although the word ‘socialism’ does not appear anywhere in the Charter, records of the proceedings show that the interpretation of the economic clauses by the working-class delegates was in direct contradiction to that of Nelson Mandela, then a rising figure in the ANC. The mover of the clause, ‘The people shall share in the country’s wealth’, explained it to the delegates as follows:
“It [the Charter] says the ownership of the mines will be transferred to the people. It says wherever there is a gold mine there will no longer be a compound boss. There will be a committee of the workers to run the mine… wherever there is a factory and… workers are exploited, we say that that the workers will take over and run the factories. In other words, the ownership of the factories will come into the hands of the people… Let the banks come back to the people, let us have a people’s committee to run the banks”.
The next speaker, representing trade unions in Natal, spelled out the meaning the workers attached to the clause: “Now comrades, the biggest difficulty we are facing in South Africa is one of capitalism in all its oppressive measures versus the ordinary people – the ordinary workers in the country. We find in this country, as the mover of the resolution pointed out, the means of production, the factories, the lands, the industries and everything possible, is owned by a small group of people who are the capitalists in this country. They skin the people, they live on the fat of the workers and make them work, as a matter of fact in exploitation… this is a very important demand in the Freedom Charter. Now we would like to see a South Africa where the industries, the land, the big business and the mines, and everything that is owned by a small group of people in this country, must be owned by all the people in this country. That is what we demand, this is what we fight for and until we have achieved it, we must not rest”.
The vague contradictory nature of the formulations in the Charter reflected the success of the capitalist leadership in diluting the more radical socialist aspirations of the workers. From the standpoint of the worker delegates, the most important conquest was the nationalisation clause. In spite of the fact that the Charter does not call specifically for the abolition of capitalism, the sweeping nationalisation it does call for at least poses the question of the system’s abolition even if it does not answer it. The omission of the word socialism however was not accidental, but reflects the dominance of the capitalist delegates at the Congress.
How the capitalists saw the Charter
Building on their success in purging the Charter of the revolutionary strivings of the workers, the leadership was at pains, throughout the entire period after the adoption of the Charter up to the end of apartheid and beyond, to clarify what they understood the Charter to stand for. The most striking of these ‘clarifications’, however, was given by Mandela himself in an article, In Our Lifetime, published in Liberation in June 1956.
“Whilst the Charter proclaims democratic changes of a far-reaching nature”, he writes, “it is by no means a blueprint for a socialist state but a programme for the unification of various classes and groupings amongst the people on a democratic basis. Under socialism the workers hold state power. They and the peasants own the means of production, the land, the factories, and the mills. All production is for use and not for profit. The Charter does not contemplate such profound political and economic changes. Its declaration, ‘The People Shall Govern!’, visualises the transfer of power not to any single social class but to all the people of this country, be they workers, peasants, professional men or petty bourgeoisie”.
“It is true that in demanding the nationalisation of the banks, the mines and the land, the Charter strikes a fatal blow at the financial and gold mining monopolies and farming interests that have for centuries plundered the country and condemned its people to servitude. But such a step is absolutely imperative and necessary because the realisation of the Charter is inconceivable, in fact impossible, unless and until these monopolies are first smashed up and the national wealth of the country turned over to the people”.
“The breaking up and democratisation of these monopolies will open up fresh fields for the development of a prosperous non-European bourgeois class. For the first time in the history of this country the non-European bourgeoisie will have the opportunity to own, in their own name and right, mines and factories, and trade and private enterprise will boom and flourish as never before”.
Of all the repeated ‘clarifications’ by the ANC leadership since, Mandela’s is the clearest declaration of the separate and in fact opposing class interests of the black working class and that of the aspirant bourgeoisie. What is spelled out in this article is that the leadership had no quarrel with ‘free enterprise’, that is capitalism. Their objection was that the black bourgeoisie had been denied the opportunity to occupy the same position as white monopoly capital at the summits of the economy. The presentation of what were in fact the separate and distinct aspirations of the black bourgeoisie as those of ‘all the social classes’ is a deception that the bourgeoisie everywhere has been obliged to resort to throughout its history.
The idea that all social classes own equally the commanding heights of the economy under capitalism is a complete falsehood. But the capitalists are obliged to present the relationship between the classes in this manner because, as a tiny minority in society, they can fulfil their aspirations only by marshalling the support of the ‘people’, that is the working class masses who alone have the capacity to shake the old order. This deceit is not unique to South Africa. It is the method not only of the colonial bourgeoisie but in fact of the bourgeois even during the rise of capitalism.
The Charter’s shortcomings
The Charter has obvious shortcomings. It does not provide for the right to strike. There are no demands for the eradication of the oppression of and discrimination against women, LGBTQ people, nor any on the environment, demands that have risen to the top of the working-class agenda today. But these shortcomings can be easily remedied. This would make the Freedom Charter even more radical. In fact its demands are already so radical that it is impossible for all of them to be implemented within the framework of capitalism. The full implementation of the Charter requires the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
The Charter’s most serious shortcoming, however, lies not so much in these omissions, but in the fact that it is completely silent on the fact that its demands are incompatible with capitalism. It fails to spell out what measures would have to be taken to enable the working class to carry out the expropriation of the capitalist class and to create the basis for its own rule. It also does not explain that the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy is the only means by which a future government would be able to place the resources in its hands to enable it to fulfil all the other demands like free education and health and to substitute the anarchy of the free market with a democratically planned economy. Radical as the demand for nationalisation is, the Charter omits to qualify the demand by linking it to workers control and management.
Nationalisation and socialism
What the worker delegates to the Congress expressed could be realised only through the overthrow of capitalism even if that was not stated explicitly. It is therefore entirely incorrect to argue, as was done in the 60th Anniversary of the Freedom Charter publication produced by Workers World Media (WWM) in 2015, that the adoption of the nationalisation clauses was of little significance as the idea of nationalisation was widely accepted at the time. It may be true that following the second world war many capitalist governments in the West implemented nationalisation to such an extent that as much as 60% of the world’s economy was under state control at one time in that period, as WWM points out. But these capitalist governments acted under the pressure of a massive post-war movement of the working class, and given the economic crisis and the radicalisation of the working class were compelled to take measures to contain the movement – to make concessions from above to stop revolution from below.
To dismiss the nationalisation clauses of the Charter as if the delegates were merely dressing themselves up in the latest policy fashion garments, is to dismiss the outlook of the worker delegates. It also tears the Congress from the historical context of the political situation prevailing at the time.
The Congress of the People occurred against the background of the biggest mass movement of the black oppressed since the colonisation of the country and was itself the largest democratic gathering ever. What the worker delegates showed at that time already was the understanding that the struggle for national liberation was bound up inextricably with the struggle against capitalism. The outlook of the workers’ delegates could only mean in practice that the attainment of the demand for national liberation and democracy would require the method of class struggle against the capitalist class, whose exploitation of their labour in the workplace was enforced and protected by the same white minority regime that held them in subjugation as blacks through apartheid.
The revolution the workers had in mind could therefore not stop once white minority rule and apartheid had been overthrown but would pass on uninterruptedly to the overthrow of capitalism as well. This is the meaning of the theory of permanent revolution as first explained by Marx and Engels… and elaborated by Trotsky in the context of the Russian revolution half-a-century later.
In this schema nationalisation was absolutely critical to the fulfilment of the aims of the revolution. That the bureaucracies in Russia (after the degeneration of the revolution), China, and Eastern Europe after the second world war, rested on state-controlled economies does not in any way diminish the importance of nationalisation as a policy indispensable to the ability of the working class in its revolution to break the power of the capitalist class, establish its rule and proceed with the thoroughgoing transformation of society.
The SA Communist Party
The attitude that nationalisation is neither here nor there would have meant not taking the side of the worker delegates at the Congress, and turning one’s back against the entire proceedings. It would have the same effect as the actual role played by the South African Communist Party (SACP) at the Congress which, instead of bolstering the demands of the workers and filling them with revolutionary content, held the workers back, herding them like cattle behind the petty bourgeois on the basis that what was involved was a ‘national democratic revolution’. That the SACP was unable to attend the Congress as a party because it was banned was in fact no barrier to its participation. It had many delegates there as ANC members. The theory of the ‘national democratic revolution’ though dictated that the SACP members should participate in the ANC not to promote the interests of their party and the proletariat in whose name it spoke, but those of the capitalist leadership of the ANC. Upon entering an ANC meeting room they dutifully left their SACP hats outside. This meant in fact bolstering the right against the left at the Congress.
Any communist party worthy of the name would have used the Congress to ensure that the Freedom Charter contained clauses that made explicit what was implicit in the worker delegates’ minds, ensuring the inclusion of socialist clauses. A genuine communist party would have called for the substitution of the Charter’s liberal preamble with one that places the working class at the head of the nation, and outlines a vision of society based on the transfer of the wealth of the country to the people by the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under the democratic control and management of the working class. A socialist preamble would go further to explain that this would require the overthrow of capitalism, the smashing of the state and the creation of a state of workers’ democracy, by replicating the workplace committees referred to by the worker delegates, in communities and cities linking them country-wide.
But imprisoned in the Stalinist two-stage theory, the SACP became the political handmaidens of the ANC bourgeois, providing them with the theoretical justification for their determination to remain firmly within the framework of capitalism and therefore, in the final analysis, collaborators of the capitalist class and imperialism.
The 1980s revolutionary movement
The real question that should be asked is why if, even in its most radical moment, when it had inscribed into the Charter demands for nationalisation for the purpose not of overthrowing capitalism but deracialising it, the ANC eventually abandoned nationalisation.
The capitalist class, who are in the business of protecting their wealth, power and privilege and keeping their boots on the necks of the workers, take a far more serious attitude to the question of nationalisation than those who think that it is but one policy option amongst many on the supermarket shelves of capitalist rule. When they occasionally resort to nationalisation it is as a temporary measure to rescue ailing companies at the expense of the state, only to hand them back to private owners for a song as soon as possible afterwards.
It is an entirely different matter however when nationalisation is demanded by their class enemies, the working class. Like bloodhounds, the capitalists detected the scent of working-class influence in the nationalisation clauses of the Charter, despite the camouflage of its woolly phraseology. They take account not only of who makes such demands, but also of the circumstances under which they are made.
The negotiated settlement signed at the end of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) process in 1993 did not spring out of a clear blue sky, driven by a regime and a capitalist class who had undergone a conversion on the road to Damascus along which they had discovered that black people had human rights and that democracy may not be such a bad thing after all. It was the culmination instead of secret talks with Mandela in prison and with selected ANC leaders abroad initiated by business, the apartheid intelligence services, and representatives of the Afrikaner elite under the hot breath of the insurrectionary movement developing in South Africa at that time.
The 1973 Durban strikes, the countrywide revolt in 1976 detonated by the Soweto uprising, the unity of workers and youth in the 1980s, the birth of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983, the acquisition by the mass movement of an increasingly insurrectionary character as the youth and workers blended into one between 1984-86 – overcoming the repression of both the partial state of emergency in 1985 and the permanent one in 1986 – and most decisively of all, the birth of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 1985, concentrated the minds of the bourgeoisie wonderfully. They could see the writing on the wall for white minority rule. What alarmed the strategists of the bourgeois most of all was the consciousness of the black working class.
How the capitalists evaluated the situation is revealed in the comments of their press of the time. “The two major demands of the Freedom Charter are that the ‘people shall share in the country’s wealth’ and ‘the land shall be shared among those who work it’,” noted the Financial Times (14 September 1985). “The fact that businessmen sought yesterday’s talks reflects the deep concern felt by South African big business at the increasing radicalisation of black thinking and the growing rejection of the free enterprise system. What the businessmen wanted to know was the degree to which this view was shared by the ANC leadership”.
A year later the same paper quoted Anglo American director Zac De Beer, one of the participants in the talks with the ANC, as saying: “We all understand how years of apartheid has caused many blacks to reject the economic as well as the political system. But we dare not allow the baby of free enterprise to be thrown out with the bathwater of apartheid”. (Financial Times, 10 June 1986)
Thus whilst hypocritically wringing their hands over the ‘unfortunate’ measures the state had to take to restore stability through the 1986-1990 State of Emergency, big business undertook a political Great Trek to the cities of Lusaka, Dakar, London and Washington to engage the ANC leadership. The strategic aim was to emasculate the Freedom Charter by exerting relentless pressure on the ANC to abandon nationalisation and thereby turn its leaders into their conscious collaborators in diverting the revolution and preserving capitalism.
Whatever the intentions of the ANC leadership, were they to attempt to implement the nationalisation clauses of the Charter what would be posed is the overthrow of capitalism itself. They would not be able to proceed in that direction in any case without the mobilisation of the masses. But since the intention of the aspirant black capitalist class is not to create a socialist society, the commanding heights of the economy shall have been taken out of the hands of white monopoly capital only to be placed in those of the black capitalist class. The working class would be expected, after acting as the foot soldiers of the black bourgeoisie in the ‘national democratic revolution’, to take their place at the bottom of the social pyramid as before and to serve their new masters. That is a scenario that would have resulted either in an uprising against the ANC government or the ANC itself would have been pushed to the left.
This was far too risky for both the ANC leadership as well as the ruling capitalist class. The strategists of capital understood that the ANC, in adhering to nationalisation, meant no harm to capitalism – a system they had wanted to be part of from the day the ANC was formed in 1912. The problem was that it would be able to carry out the policy of nationalisation only by expropriating the capitalist class. This would not have been possible through a mere legislative process. The masses would have had to be mobilised to overcome the inevitable resistance of the capitalist class who would have resorted to armed force to protect their wealth and property.
In the context of the uprisings taking place and the radicalisation of the masses, the perspective would be one of civil war. As the flames of revolution reached higher the Financial Mail (6 December 1985) warned: “Interventionist military action in a last-ditch attempt to retain the status quo… has not been discounted in some quarters. Just which would be the worst-case scenario – a dictatorship of the Left or of the Right – is open to conjecture. Few, however, who have any insight into the ideological drift of the ANC Freedom Charter and its talk of nationalisation, have any serious doubts on that score. Anything would be preferable to seeing SA’s economy decimated by such crude attempts at ‘wealth redistribution’ implicit in the doctrine of the Charter”.
The bourgeois would have had no hesitation to try and drown the revolution in blood. But that was not their preferred first option. Given the racial balance of forces and the temper of the masses who, far from being cowed by the State of Emergency were intensifying the struggle, a military solution was too risky. Its outcome was not at all a certainty, could spark racial civil war, and inevitably lead to South Africa’s further isolation internationally.
The only way in which the ANC would then be able to carry through nationalisation would be by the mobilisation of the working class, an armed insurrection and the seizure of power by force. Uncertain of the outcome of such a scenario, the bourgeois concentrated on ensnaring the ANC leadership in a negotiated surrender, secure in the knowledge that if the ANC leadership faced a choice between leading a socialist revolution and collaborating with them, the ANC would choose the latter.
The strategists of capital thus set about the task of co-opting the ANC, ensnaring it in negotiations that culminated in the betrayal at CODESA. In a massive propaganda campaign the negotiated settlement was presented as a ‘miracle’ by the media in South Africa and internationally and as a ‘democratic breakthrough’ by the SACP.
ANC capitulates
This pressure paid off handsomely. The leadership went into headlong retreat with the SACP providing the theoretical cover for this cowardly capitulation. By October 1985 ANC president Oliver Tambo gave British imperialism the assurance in an address to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons of the British parliament that the Freedom Charter “does not even purport to destroy the capitalist system”. Earlier that month Zac De Beer recalled that Tambo had said that “large sectors of the economy would be left open to private enterprise”. (Guardian Weekly, 5 October 1985) By 1987 the South African Financial Mail, reporting on the talks in Dakar in Senegal, reported that the ANC delegation “had agreed that there was a distinction between ownership of minerals, which belonged to the nation, and the right to extract it which must be purchased. This section might have to be reworded, an ANC representative said”. (14 August 1987)
Comrade Ronnie Kasrils in an otherwise courageous and commendably honest acknowledgment of the betrayals in the negotiations in a preface to his biography, Armed and Dangerous, attributes what happened to the naivety of the leadership in the negotiations. This is a mistaken view. The foundations of the betrayals were embedded in the SACP’s theoretical DNA and the class character of the ANC. The SACP’s 1962 programme spells this out very clearly:
“The immediate and imperative interests of all sections of the South African people demand the carrying out of… a national democratic revolution which will overthrow the colonial state of White supremacy and establish an independent state of national democracy in South Africa. The main content of this revolution is the national liberation of the African people”. “It is in this situation that the Communist Party advances its immediate proposals before the workers and democratic people of South Africa. They are not proposals for a socialist state. They are proposals for a national democratic state”.
Although the SACP general secretary Joe Slovo (1984-1991) was to recognise the inextricable link between the struggle for national liberation and the overthrow of capitalism in his 1976 book, No Middle Road, it was the same Slovo, in an address to the board of Woolworths in the early 1990s who argued that “nationalisation would be extremely costly… [would] be met by capital flight and skilled manpower, and possibly lead to economic collapse”. He likened nationalisation to “consigning the heights of our economy to a commandist bureaucracy”.
The ANC on the other hand was never a workers party, but a party of the black middle class and the aspirant black capitalist class. The leadership’s commitment to capitalism was complemented by the SACP’s championing of the two-stage theory on which the concept of the national democratic revolution is based. In combination they provided the political basis for the betrayals consummated at CODESA.
Total capitulation followed rapidly after the initial ‘re-interpretations’ of the Charter. The Charter was abandoned even before the 1994 elections and substituted with the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) stripped of the nationalisation notions so offensive to the capitalists. By 1996, barely two years into democracy, even the RDP was jettisoned and the neo-liberal GEAR programme adopted.
Despite the fact that the outcome of the deliberations at the 1955 Congress of the People had been manipulated to dilute the Freedom Charter, denuding it as much as possible of the revolutionary socialist aspirations of the worker delegates, the mobilisation for the Congress was much more democratic and based on inviting workers and activists to contribute towards its contents and to debate them at the event itself. In sharp contrast GEAR was developed by a team of experts from the World Bank and selected ANC leaders trained in the ideas of the neo-liberal ‘Washington consensus’. It was adopted by cabinet without even the ANC NEC being consulted and presented to the ANC conference in Mafikeng a year later as an accomplished fact merely for rubber stamping.