The work that follows – retracing the historical course that from the first European colonisation, saw the formation of a national fabric, up to today’s South African state – wants to reaffirm, not on the basis of abstract ideas, but on the contrary, starting from the irrefutable data of history and economics, the correctness of those theses and positions that organically arise from them, which alone make the Party today the only one able to indicate without uncertainties and with clarity the way forward to the black proletariat of South Africa. This path, recognising in the state the exclusive power of the bourgeois class and not that of other classes preceding it in the historical path, leads the black proletariat and the masses of the reserveless in the ghettos, in the name of the real and effective defence of their existence, towards a head-on clash with state power, without conceding anything to the democratic siren, on pain of losing their class compass, an essential premise for the conquest of proletarian power.

This work, since we are communists and not bourgeois historiographers, will not trace in a doctrinaire manner the entire period running from the first Carthaginian discoveries of this territory to the bourgeois governments of today, but will attempt to trace a line that links the essential periods in which economic and social changes necessarily led to the political changes that culminated in the apartheid policy of today. These periods can be traced to three major moments: the first (1652-1867) from the first founding of the Cape Colony by the Dutch East India Company up to the mining discoveries; the second leading up to the Second World War; and the third from the war up to the present day.

The people who were living on the South African perimeter before European colonisation are divided into two races: Hottentots and Bushmen, while the Bantu – who today make up a large percentage of the black population – migrated from North Africa over a very long period that began even before colonisation and stretches, as the battles that the Boers had to engage in show, as far back as 1800.

Hottentots and Bushmen had a primitive, tribal-based social organisation based on bands of 50-100 members, completely independent and autonomous from one another. Tribal life was generally led by the oldest and most experienced of its members, who did not, however, enjoy any real judicial authority. The Bushmen derived their livelihood from hunting and gathering, practising neither agriculture nor cattle breeding, and were therefore necessarily nomadic. As for the Hottentots, they possessed a more developed degree of civilisation, reared cattle and knew ironworking; they too practised nomadism. In both races, each band considered itself the proprietor of a certain plot of land, the boundaries of which it respected, within which it alone had the right to hunt and breed cattle. These peoples, already decimated by clashes with each other, divided even within themselves, with such low social development, were wiped out by European colonialism and very few elements of them can be found in today’s South African population.

The Bantu had a much more developed social organisation, based on the tribes, highly centralised communities with their own name, their own territory and their own chief whose power was transmitted hereditarily. His authority was very broad and tribal membership was determined more by submission to the chief than by birth. The main economic activities were agriculture, to which the women were dedicated, and cattle breeding, to which the men were dedicated; all the tribal land theoretically belonged to the tribal chief, not in a personal capacity, however, but so that he could administer it on behalf of the community. The tribal chief subdivided the tribal land into plots, allocating them to the heads of the families and reserving part of it for communal grazing. He was also the military leader of the group and the highest religious authority.

Peoples therefore, in part settled, independent of each other, with subsistence economies, roughly comparable to the indigenous North American populations, in part immigrated from other territories in the constant search for hunting grounds or more fertile pastures.

With this we can make our first point: the denial, that is, of a South African nationality of these races, in the sense of their re-appropriation, in the guise of today’s black proletarians, of the nation, snatched from them by the white hand. In fact, this thesis is as bogus as the one that would have the Native Americans of today’s reservations as ‘owners’ of the United States of America. The thesis is also partly adopted by the Pretoria government, which with its apartheid, or separate development policy, exalts black ‘nationality’ and relegates it to the bantustans, so that it can ‘be developed’ in a pure form away from any deleterious clash with white civilisation according to the ‘ancestral tendency of race’. This tawdry thesis covers up – and not even with much success – the South African bourgeoisie’s interest in relegating black labour to ghetto territories from which, when needed, it can draw labour power for its economic apparatus.

However, in every case of countries where for imperialist interests a nationality actually was crushed, the capitalist side has always denied its existence, going so far as to deny the most self-evident reality. In the rest of this work we shall establish that, like the settlers of the North American West, it is to the credit of the Boer colonisers that the South African nation in the sense of economic identity and state organisation was constituted first into independent statelets, then into a federation, then into the modern state.

At the time of the Dutch discovery of the South African lands, the difficulties of recruitment and the scarcity of manpower to maintain the naval base forced the Company to release some of its employees from their commitment to the Company and to revise its intransigent position against any form of colonisation. In fact, for a long time, first the Dutch and then the British openly opposed a colonisation policy that did not seem to yield immediate profits, maintaining the Cape and the other outposts as staging posts for cargos bound for the Indies. Hence the constant clash between the settlers and the British in particular. The former considered the land their homeland and demanded the protection of the British state from the natives while the latter was barricaded behind the policy of ‘non-interference’ that allowed them not to commit large amounts of capital.

Throughout this period, up to the discovery of the mines, the purely ‘defensive’ attitude of the settlers towards the natives, where defensive must be understood in the sense of a constant defence of the whites against the environment. In short, two ways of living clash, but there is still no subjection of one race to the other, the burgher defends his own land, his own cattle. What is clear is that this clash is the germ of a clash between two modes of production which will see the succumbing of the more backward tribal one, and which will lead to the first theorisations of apartheid as soon as the yellow mineral nuggets are discovered, with the consequent crushing of the black population. But all this in the 1700s, when the Huguenot settlers arrived, is yet to come and relations with black people for a long time, if not conducted as equals, are not too unbalanced.

This early period in the life of the Cape colony is marked by considerable economic difficulties. If initially, as a supply station for ships en route to the Indies, the Cape could not meet demand, now, as it became a colony, supply exceeded demand and the settlers could not find a market for their products. The situation was serious mainly due to the Dutch East India Company’s tightening of its commercial monopoly on the Cape’s three main products: meat, wheat, and wine. Attempts to introduce other crops had all failed. As a result of this, agriculture ended up being neglected in favour of cattle breeding, thus forming the figure – mentioned above – of the trekboer, a nomadic cattle breeder who pushed further and further inland in search of new pastures, ignoring the limits set by the government, clashing with the local tribes, forming his own military system (the commandos) independent of the state garrisons. It was during this period (1778) that the first war with the Xhosa vanguards of the Bantu peoples occurred, who, as we mentioned, were emigrating from north to south.

Economic difficulties and the European War of 1794 undermined Dutch power and England succeeded it in occupation. The British lion, no longer representing a trading company, could easily grant the burghers complete freedom of trade within the country and considerable facilities in trade with foreign countries. The white population of the Cape was then 20,000 settlers, 25,000 were slaves, about 15,000 were Hottentots in the service of the settlers. The Bushmen had already all but disappeared. British policy tended to grant concessions to the settlers and to make pacts with the black populations in order to avoid confrontations that would force it to increase its military apparatus, to invest without profit. Increasingly realising the strategic importance of the colony, which until now had only been considered as an outpost and not as a territory to be exploited economically, a series of changes began, such as the distribution of land on a semi-permanent basis (until now it had only been in concession to the colonists who undertook to cultivate it) but with higher rents, established not on the basis of size – for which a maximum was set – but on the basis of fertility. This, and the arrival of new British settlers, expanded the colonised area, increasing settled production and consequently giving rise to a series of towns that represent the first truly organised form of the colonisation movement.

From 1800 began the period that would see the burghers increasingly at odds with British power. By pushing for legislation to force black people to work in their service, they fomented revolt among the tribes with whom, on the contrary, Britain sought to maintain benevolent contacts. The Magna Carta of the Hottentots (1809), which established special restrictions on the black population, was abolished by the English authority in 1826, sparking revolt among the settlers who saw the possibility of recruiting cheap labour disappear; the previously established residency requirement was abolished and the Hottentots were granted the right to own land. The legislation on the Hottentots and the progressive elimination of slavery, a phenomenon that could only be considered completely extinguished in 1838, the denial of military aid by the British to the settlers, the search for new land, and the insecurity of the eastern frontier were the reasons for the great emigration of the Boers, which led to the colonisation of the northern part of South Africa.

We would like to reiterate a few points here:
1) the indigenous peoples are nominally free, even if subjected to a subjugation that sees their economic conditions at very low levels;
2) colonisation does not take over a pre-existing economic fabric;
3) the Boer is really a settler and not a coloniser.

From this data we can already establish:
a) that the historical journey of the South African nation passes through the recognition of South African nationality in the guise of the European settlers, who make South Africa their true and only homeland, subsequently fighting British imperialism as alien to their national interests; thus this nationality is not at all taken away from those who did not possess it.
b) The condition of the black proletariat today is not determined by a white ‘slave’ policy, which relegates black people to the subordinate role of plebs by virtue of its alleged ‘racial superiority’, on the contrary, just as the white settlers of the 1830s demanded legislation in their favour for the sole purpose of forcing labour to work the land, later this policy, extended to the industrial scale, allows the white bosses – by which I mean the white bosses – not the whites, to sustain an economic policy that is just as impossible.

To sum up: South African colonisation is not of the England-India type, but of the North American settler-indigenous population type. The conditions under which the black workers live today are not those of the black nationality bullied by the colonial powers; the ‘racist government’ is the national bourgeois government and this is not overthrown by demanding more democracy, rather, it is about moving as a South African proletariat against the South African bourgeoisie. Nothing more.

The year 1835 marked the beginning of the Boer colonial expansion, which through the movement known as the Great Trek pushed into the Transvaal and established – albeit for only two years before falling under English control – the first Boer republic in Natal. England still openly opposed the founding of independent states and, through a series of pacts made with the indigenous tribes and a few wars, regained its hegemony over all the territory controlled by the colonists, extending the frontier of the Cape colony as far as the Orange and later Transorangia. It was not until 1852 that England, squeezed on one side by continuous indigenous pressure and on the other by the rise of continual rebellions by the colonists, granted first the Transvaal and then the Orange the possibility of establishing themselves as free republics.

From this point on South Africa was divided into two distinct sections: a Boer northern section and a British southern section, marked by different social needs that led to a different understanding of relations with the natives: in the North a policy based on racial suppression, which allowed wages for the natives engaged on the farms or in the service of the settlers to be kept to the minimum; in the South, there was greater freedoms, which allowed British imperialism more freedom of movement in relation to the local tribes. It should be noted that this greater freedom went as far as granting the right to vote to black people, as the elections of 1854 demonstrate. The elevation of Natal to an autonomous colony closed an initial cycle of formation of the national fabric that would inevitably lead the various republics, with interests conflicting with those of British imperialism, to seek federation and, following the mining discoveries, to the Anglo-Boer wars.

The discovery of mineral deposits causes, as can be easily guessed, a radical change in British policy which, in view of the possibility of large revenues, aims – now indeed – to organise the sub-continent under one government. On the other hand, the nationalism of the various republics now has solid ground to stand on. Various European powers, primarily Germany, were also attracted to what appeared to be a lucrative business opportunity. Bismarck’s government through the commercial action of a number of companies took possession of the still free regions northwest of Cape Colony and along the Atlantic coast.

Gold and diamonds not only attracted huge masses of immigrants but also opened the door to European capital, which enabled mining to be organised on an industrial scale. The sudden clash (1884) with the capitalist mode of production disrupted the republics’ still agricultural and pastoral economic system.

The major companies, to ensure the stability of financing, a factor that had led to the bankruptcy of a myriad of fictitious companies with the consequent loss of confidence and collapse of gold shares, to ensure also greater efficiency from mining and in their search for a monopoly, moved towards the formation of trusts, among which the Rhodes Company became prominent in 1892.

The latter, governor of the Cape since 1890, on the wave of the expansion of the railway network, and in possession of enormous capital, set about creating a great African federation that was to extend from Cairo to Cape Town. This project was openly opposed by the Transvaal, jealous of its own national independence and especially of the enormous deposits discovered on its territory. It was during this historical period that the Rhodesian nation took shape. Rhodes, relying on the conflicts the Transvaal State was having with the new immigrants (who greatly outnumbered the Boer population and who were not allowed naturalisation until after a period of 14 years and who were opposed in every way) attempted to annex the Republic to the Cape Colony, an annexation that was realised in 1900 after a war that had seen England prevail only with the commitment of all its imperial might. The 1902 treaty formally sanctioned the end of Boer independence and the elevation of the Transvaal and Orange into a British colony.

The Anglo-Boer wars represent the clash between two modes of production: the modern capitalist one and the agricultural and pastoral one. The conflict and the British victory represent not so much the crushing of the Boer nationality in favour of British imperialism, but the manifestation of the process that sees the transformation of the Boer farmer into a trader and industrialist, the birth of the towns, of the factories, of a truly national productive and mercantile fabric. In short, the Anglo-Boer conflict represents the gestation of the modern South African state.

The national fabric that had slowly been created through the work of the republics was at this point complete. Rhodes’s federative dream having been defeated, the problem of building a solid political-economic system capable of avoiding a new future balkanisation of South Africa urgently arose again, and the knot of the creation of a unitary state from the various colonies was raised. In 1910 the knot was untied and the formation of the new state was real; it was not, however, completely autonomous from England, but it did enjoy a large degree of internal autonomy.

The formation of the new state, the mining production, the nascent manufacturing industry changed, as previously mentioned, the terms of the relationship with the indigenous populations: while during the whole of the previous period it had been above all a question of territorial defence against the incursions of the frontier tribes, which they had tried to repel or in the worst cases to restrict to certain territories, but with whom they tried to maintain good neighbourly relations, now the problem became economic, directed towards an intensive procurement and exploitation of labour. It was precisely the democratic Labour Party that first gave shape to the policy of apartheid; driven by economic determinations, it immediately realised that the crushing of the black proletariat was the necessary basis and premise for a mining and industrial development capable of providing otherwise inconceivable profits. Only with the extensive use of underpaid variable capital would it be possible to get the majority of the mines up and running, just as a speculative manufacturing industry could be established. Here again, it is not the ‘racial’ problem that sets its conditions, but the economic one.

Since the problem of labour was linked to that of indigenous land ownership, in 1913 the government passed a law – the ‘Natives Land Act’ – which divided the country into areas exclusively reserved for the natives and areas exclusively reserved for Europeans, and established the principle that the residence of Africans outside the areas assigned to them could only be justified by a working relationship with white owners and entrepreneurs. Therefore, no longer defence of the farm, but strict link between the reserve – as a mass of potential proletarians – and capital; no longer hunting territories to be granted to the tribes in exchange for their non-belligerence, but areas far from the mining centres, not connected to the railway network, areas of waste, marshlands or deserts.

The First World War saw the South African nation personally involved in the war, which, by renouncing the British garrison, directly assumed the burden of defence. Naturally, this was an attempt to increase autonomy from England and to make South West Africa, once the victorious war was over, a fifth province of the Union. The aim was only partially achieved and South Africa had to be content with a mandate over the territory. We shall return to look at this area in more detail in future works in order to demonstrate – once again setting out from historical and economic analysis alone – whether there really is a national question of South West Africa (Namibia), or whether the national liberation movements operating there represent nothing more than secessionist forces.

Despite the aversion of the Europeans of Boer origin who had united in the Nationalist Party, it was the coalition of pro-British parties that led the nation in the early post-war period and began the first period of industrialisation. This period, if it always saw the greater squeezing of the living conditions of the black population, also saw, on the other hand, a state hardening towards the white labour force, which also had to submit to the iron laws of capitalist development. While today – as the economic part of the work will confirm – the white proletariat does not exist, if not as a labour aristocracy, lavishly paid and inextricably linked to the interests of the master state, in this period of historical development the white proletariat is a reality (see the immigration of the ‘poor whites’ from the Transvaal following the economic depression), albeit at levels that are nevertheless enormously superior, in terms of wages and living conditions, to the black proletariat. The decision of the Chamber of Mines to reduce wages and its proposal to set the racial ratio of employment at 1 white to 10.5 Bantu in order to expand production by bringing in new labour, thus ditching the previous ratio of 3.5 coloured to 1 white, provoked a whole series of riots, even leading to fierce gunfights in the Rand white workers’ insurrection.

The long post-World War I crisis undermined the foundations of the pro-Bantu government and meant that the Nationalist Party (with an agricultural and conservative social base) and the Labour Party (white workers in the mines and industries), united around the formula of complete self-government of the Union and for greater control of the economy, could prevail. The Hertzog government tried to lean on the coloureds in an attempt to set them against the Bantu majority, who were to be strictly separated from the rest of the population, deprived of the right to vote and relegated to particular territories. In the economic field, the government encouraged the manufacturing industry; farmers were given more credit facilities and were encouraged, through the abolition of duties, to grow tobacco; protectionist laws were passed in favour of cattle-breeders against the import of livestock from Rhodesia; measures were taken to prevent a drop in the price of diamonds by controlling their mining and sale. This domestic policy corresponded to an increasing autonomy from England.

1929, the year of the Great World Economic Depression, saw: a fall in diamond prices due to the collapse of the US market; a fall in the price of wool; a general standstill of the South African economy. The strong gold reserves and the young age of the industry still strong in the production drive, combined with the unrestrained exploitation of the labour force, allowed South Africa to overcome the crisis and between 1934 and 1938 eliminated its balance of payments deficit, reaching a surplus of 19 million pounds. The Nationalist Party and the South African (pro-British tendency) merged in 1934 as Malan’s new Nationalist Party was born, totally intent on the extension of the racial separation laws.

The Second World War, in which South Africa supported England – albeit amidst disagreements between the Boer and British sides – caused an expansion of the country’s industrial base, pushing new industries into the production of commodities that had previously been imported. It was also from 1945 that the industrial exploitation of uranium deposits discovered since 1932 began.

It was after World War II, after 15 years of pro-English rule, that the Nationalist Party won and the policy of apartheid was codified. It is clear that the two terms of the question are closely linked: on the one hand, the national economy decisively assumes an independent character and consequently a national bourgeoisie that wants to defend this economic independence from British imperialism; on the other hand, the basis of this economic development is a further and ‘essential’ crushing of the black proletariat, with the aim of chaining it to production by granting it minimum subsistence. The only difference between the apartheid policy of this period and previous theorisations lies in the fact that it is now knowingly pursued by a state apparatus ‘firmly resolved to apply it consistently and totally’ (Malan).

The first move is the dissolution of the ‘subversive’ organisations (outlawing the CPSA in 1951) and repression of all those organisations recognised as pro-communist. Once these ‘dangerous hotbeds’ had been eliminated, they could dedicate themselves to crushing the workers, without whom the bourgeoisie realised it could not realise its industrialisation plan: (1955) the provinces, the municipalities, the ‘white’ districts are to be entirely cleared of the blacks; any movement of black people is forbidden unless specifically authorised by the white authorities; expropriation of the land owned by black people; exclusion also of mulattos and Indians from the electoral lists; replacement of the representative councils of the indigenous peoples with state-appointed bodies; prohibition of particular occupations for non-whites; constitution of trade unions reserved only for black workers under state control through which given jobs could be imposed on Negroes (the heaviest, worst paid jobs, and where the mortality rate is higher, we would add!); prohibition of sexual relations between the two races; imposition by the state of programmes in schools for Negroes; forced relocation of the natives from their areas of residence to areas reserved for them.

Of course, an attempt is being made to pass off this massive attack on the conditions of black proletarians as state ‘concern’ for a ‘true and independent development of black culture and possibilities’: bourgeois shamelessness certainly has no limits! To grant peculiar possibilities to black people is in effect to allow them to croak in factories or to croak on reserves! Not everyone is so indulgent.

The Boer monopolisation of political, economic and social decisions in the life of the South African nation is therefore not a strange product of history, it is simply the codification of the process of the formation of the national bourgeoisie, antagonistic, for reasons of the purse, to a policy still tied to the interests of England.

A quick look also at those indigenous parties that would claim to be taking on the defence of the interests and aspirations of black people. This is because, premised on the non-existence of the Communist Party, the possible proliferation of parties or organisations of a petty-bourgeois nature (see Black People’s Convention, etc.) would play a strongly negative role with respect to the struggle that the black proletariat, today, in 1976, is waging. These organisations, and to get straight to the point, the African National Congress for example, do not represent black people from a class point of view, but on the contrary represent pushes in a democratic direction, for a liberalisation of relations between blacks and whites, a position which tends towards the claim of a black nation that exists in a ‘proportional’ sense, in terms of a head count.

Now we assert that since South Africa is a developed capitalist country, where it is only due to conditions peculiar to that nation that class relations are filtered through skin colour, the only road the black proletariat can follow is the one that leads to the overthrow of bourgeois state power.

The problem of the double revolution, of the democratic revolution, where the proletariat – though separated by programme and organisation – joins forces with the bourgeoisie to overthrow feudal or colonial power, does not exist here. Here, class relations are rooted in the logic of a more mature capitalism, which shows itself in every aspect of economic and social life. So, no working-class concessions to the bourgeois enemy; not two, two hundred, or two thousand ways to power but one, and only one, which passes uniquely through the struggle to overthrow the state of the class antagonist. Along the path that will lead the working class from the defence of its living conditions to the attack against the Pretoria state, it will have to reform, for this struggle to have any prospect of victory, the Party which is the true and only expression of the class.

The years from 1958 to the present saw the further industrial development of South Africa – albeit hampered by the international crisis – the extension of the ‘separate development policy’ and the awakening of black working class combativeness. The events of the last year and what they represent have already been outlined by the Party in previous articles.

We would like, in closing this first part of the work, to dwell just on the issue of ‘Bantustans’. This is because the Pretoria government just a month ago officially inaugurated this policy, with a resolution to extend it to other parts of South Africa. This initiative involved black proletarians and lumpenproletarians being forced to undergo massive relocations within their assigned area. The ‘Bantustans’, in addition to representing the legal codification of the reserves, represent puppet states to which the Negro workers are compulsorily bound and with the introduction of which they are even deprived – by becoming foreign proletarians in the workplace – of the meagre state assistance they had previously benefitted from.

Let us give some figures on Transkei – this is the name of the new state-lager – as yet another demonstration of the apartheid policy: Transkei has a population of 1,700,000 plus 1,600,000 living in the so-called ‘White South Africa’. Of the country’s resident population, 46.5% is under the age of fifteen; 63% of the population between the ages of fifteen and forty-four are women. There are no major urban agglomerations, ports, industrial centres, railways or mines. Fewer than 50,000 people are in paid employment and of these about half are employed by the ‘government’ (bureaucrats and policemen) while only 4,050 people work in manufacturing. The majority of the labour force are ‘migrants’ to White South Africa; these number 257,000 and contribute 70% of the ‘national’ income. The country is so barren and unproductive that it is forced to import almost all foodstuffs, including maize which is the staple food.

In 1972-73, the ‘government’ collected only 9.1 million rand, or 32.3% of total income, from its own resources (taxes, fines, etc.), while the South African government provided it with 28.1 million rand. Estimates for 1974-75 still indicate 9.1 million rand from local resources and 64 million rand from the South African government. The army is commanded by South African officers.

These are the facts: nothing but a big concentration camp where underpaid labour is taken. This is the only possible policy for the South African bourgeoisie.

In the previous article, we traced, from a historical perspective, the formation process of South African society.

In particular, we have seen how, from the very beginning of colonisation, a South African nationality, white and of European descent, was formed and consolidated, but quickly broke all ties with the mother country. This nationality, the Boers, were the architects of the colonisation of the present territory and laid the foundations of the country’s economic and social structure, representing the unifying element of the modern South African nation. In the beginning, South African society was agrarian-pastoral in nature and its relations with the black population were predominantly geared towards the defence of colonised territories or the conquest of new ones, while only a small proportion of black people were incorporated into the white farms.

With the discovery of mineral deposits, a cycle of capitalist accumulation began around the middle of the 19th century, which saw the rise of towns, the development of communications and trade, and the implantation of a solid industrial structure. In the course of this phase, the relationship between South African society and the black population took an opposite turn: the problem was no longer to keep warring tribes at bay, but to snatch ever larger masses of Bantu from primitive and tribal life, proletarianise them and integrate them into agricultural, mining, and industrial production. The intensive exploitation of this very cheap labour force was the driving force behind the rapid development of an advanced capitalist-type economy.

In correspondence the modern nation-state was formed, through a series of ups and downs, with the main function of guaranteeing, through a monstrous repressive apparatus, the bestial exploitation of the Negro proletariat, of defending capitalist society from this gigantic antagonistic power that was ‘forced to develop within its bosom’.

The insertion of black people within South African society was not matched by the integration of the two races, but by their polarisation at the two opposite extremes, in the sense that while the black population came to represent the mass of the dispossessed, the proletariat, the white nationality became the class of the masters, the capitalists. So that today we can say, and we shall see this in the following development, that the racial division and opposition corresponds exactly to the social division and opposition between proletarians and capitalists, the two distinct races correspond to the two distinct classes of modern society.

As for their nationality, black people lost it the moment they were torn from tribal life, separated from that mode of production, that culture and those traditions. They have, in their condition as proletarians, definitively lost their natural and organic attachment to the tribes while, it is the state that, purely for the sake of social preservation, nurtures tribal division, exalts the traditions, customs, and nationalities of the black population.

This situation places the black racial question in the exclusive terms of the class question between proletariat and bourgeoisie as it is posed in the more industrialised countries. And similarly, in these countries, demands of a democratic or national nature from the black proletariat assumes an analogous significance: mystification of class relations, a false objective on which the bourgeoisie attempts to lead the proletarian class.

If in fact we have on some occasions attributed revolutionary significance to this claim, it was when the struggle of the proletariat, flanked by the more radical strata of the bourgeoisie, was still face to face with the power of the old feudal castes and colonialism, i.e. tasks of a national bourgeois type to be completed.

This condition does not exist in South Africa. In fact, this is not a nation suffering colonial-type oppression, and which therefore faces the problem of its independence. Moreover, since the nation state was established, i.e. for almost a century and a half, the local bourgeoisie has been firmly in power.

All this has already been amply demonstrated in the first part of this work. Moreover, the economic and social structure is fully capitalist and the apartheid system is not a derivation of the slave or colonial system, but the modern and efficient tool by which capitalism secures cheap labour.

All this, as also derived from the description of historical evolution, we will demonstrate in this second part by directly examining the current socio-economic set-up. This study, which defines more precisely the environment in which the class struggle is taking place, allows us to measure the revolutionary potential compressed in the South African hotbed and to provide the indications that the bloody experiences of the Negro proletariat provide and require from the class Party.

The remarkable wealth of statistical data on the South African economy that can be found already in itself demonstrates its capitalist character. In fact, unlike preceding economies, which enjoy a system of spontaneous self-regulation of their production, capitalism incessantly conjures up uncontrollable productive forces and develops an anarchic economy, which it then desperately seeks to understand in order to control and plan, trying to limit the antagonisms that necessarily develop within it.

The population of almost 22 million is 71% Negro, 12% mulatto and Asian, the so-called ‘coloured’, and only 17% white.

We find the same distribution for the working population. As can be seen, the majority is black.

Moreover, 90% of the black working population is proletarianised while the remaining 10% are peasants who live off the subsistence economy of the reserves and who, as we shall see, can be considered the industrial reserve army needed to keep the cost of labour at a minimum.

Referring to the entire working population, including whites and coloureds, we can say that about 70% are proletarianised (in Italy only 51%).

Looking at the situation by sector, we see that in agriculture, where the degree of proletarianisation is generally lower, proletarians (permanent and seasonal wage-earners) make up 80% of the working population, while mixed workers (workers who receive part salary and part concession on a small piece of land) are 8% and peasants only 7%.

Also characteristic here is the division according to race: 86% of proletarians are black and only 1% are whites, while no black person is a peasant direct cultivator nor still less a landowner, and 85% of peasants are whites.

In mining and industry, the vast majority of workers are black and constitute the true labour force, while whites perform specialised and managerial tasks, roles which, even by law, are forbidden to black labour.

As for wages we see that in industry the average wage of a Negro is only 18% of that of a white, in the mines only 6%. As can be seen, in each industry there is no petty bourgeoisie or working class aristocracy of the black race, or it is a number so small as to be socially insignificant. The class array is thus perfectly delineated, lacking that large stratum of the middle classes which, especially in the absence of the influence of the revolutionary party, dampens the class atmosphere of the proletariat in the industrialised countries. No boring sociologist will ever be able, by playing around with statistics, to blur these precise contours.

There is, however, a racial minority, that of the mulattos and Asians, who have been integrated into South African society for centuries and have been able to partially escape the clean cut that the apartheid system has practised there. Indeed, they enjoy certain freedoms such as, in part, that of trade union association and their average wage is higher than that of a Negro although still far lower than that of a white. A small agrarian bourgeoisie has also developed among them (5% of the peasants are coloured) and in the cities, especially in small trade and handicrafts. The state grants these opportunities because it trusts in the conservative role these classes can play vis-à-vis the proletariat. Indeed, if Gandhi, the theorist of non-violence, was able to carry out his nefarious action even among the South African masses, it was precisely because he had found support and a following among these strata.

We have argued that South Africa’s economic structure is of an advanced capitalist type despite, as we shall see, the imbalances and backwardnesses it presents.

A first piece of evidence for this assumption is the proletarianisation data above, which shows that the wage labour relation is the one on which production in all sectors is based.

Another figure indicating the level of industrialisation is that of overall steel production and in particular per capita. South Africa is the only steel producer of any significance in Africa; its production is 5,628,000 tonnes, exactly the same as Sweden, while the per capita steel production, removing from the calculation the six million inhabitants of the reserves, who are outside of production and excluded from the economic circuit, reaches 3.3 quintals per capita, against Italy’s 3.8.

We could quote other figures for key industrial production products, such as electricity, and they would all unequivocally reconfirm the country’s advanced industrialisation.

Another important fact is the development of communications: in South Africa, despite the presence of vast swampy, inaccessible and desert areas, and Bantu reserves, where there are no modern communication systems, there are 18 km of railways for every 1,000 km² of territory, compared to 54 for Italy and 75 for England.

If we then consider the gross national product divided by sectors, shown in the table, we can see the considerable increase in percentage terms of industrial production, which occurred especially after the Second World War, at the expense of mining production (and this tends to take South Africa away from its status as a mainly raw material producing country) and agricultural production, which declined in percentage terms, despite the increase in the mass of product from 58 million Rand in 1911-12 to 980 million in 1964-65, the latter phenomenon being typical of the development of capitalist production.

GNP % – by sector
	SOUTH AFRICA								Developed Countries		Back­ward Coun­tries
									U.K.	Ita­ly	Zai­re	Ni­ge­ria
	1911 ­12	1924 -25	1932 -33	1938 -39	1951 -52	1963 -64	1963 -64	1973	1973
	Official South African sources						ILO
Agricul.	17.4	19.9	12.2	12.6	13.8	9.2	12	7.6	2.6	8.7	16.3	35
Mining	27.1	17.4	24.3	20.7	13.0	12.6	15	12.4	–	31	–	–
Industry	6.7	12.4	13.6	17.7	25.0	27.8	23	21.6	26.2		7.8	6.6
Others	48.8	50.3	49.9	49	48.2	50.4	–	–	–	–	–	–
	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100

Comparing today’s figures with those of some industrialised counties and other backward ones, it is clear that South Africa fits into the first group.

With regard to the working population by sectors, illustrated in the table, one can see the extent to which South Africa’s condition differs from that of the backward countries. However, the figure for the agricultural population, even if it should reasonably be lowered to 22-23% by excluding the labour force working in the subsistence economy of the reserves, is considerably higher than in Italy, especially in view of the fact that agricultural production in South Africa accounts for less of the gross national product than in Italy.

Moreover, if we look at the GNP per capita, always excluding the reserve population, we find that the figure for South Africa does not even reach that of Spain and is almost half that of Italy. The reason for this is the relatively low productivity of agricultural labour caused, as we shall see below, by the low investment of fixed capital in this sector.

WORKING POPULATION BY SECTOR %							* Including reserves ** Excluding reserves
	SOUTH AFRICA								Developed Countries		Backward Countries
	Divided by race				In total				U.K.	Ita­ly	Nige­ria	Alge­ria
	1960		1972		1951	1960		1970
	whi­tes	Non-whi­tes	whi­tes	Non-whi­tes		*	**		1966	1971	1963	1966
Agricult.	7	93	–	–	33	30	24	28	3.1	16.4	55.7	50.4
Mining	10	90	9	91	11	11	11	8	2.3	31.2	0.1	0.9
Industry	34	66	25	75	11	12	18	13	34.8		12	6.4
Construc.	26	74	20	80	5	1		6	7.8	10.2	–	5.0
Others	27	73	–	–	39	46	–	45	52	42.2	32.2	37.3
					100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100

If we delve into the description of the economy, it is not in order to carry out an erudite treatise, but in the consideration, proper to Marxism, that the economic substructure represents the terrain in which class antagonisms are rooted.

Marxist analysis has always paid special attention to the characteristic features of agriculture, because it is the agrarian problem that is one of the knots that the revolution will have to unravel, in view of the type of land division, its mode of tenure, the structure of ownership and the social classes that come into play.

The characteristics of the soil and the rainfall regime are not very favourable for the development of agriculture in South Africa. In fact, the land is covered not only by forests, but to a large extent by savannah and other herbaceous formations, and is not suitable for cultivation; furthermore, the few rivers that flow through it have a short course and, running through impervious areas, hardly lend themselves to irrigation. Above all, the difficulties of irrigation do not allow intensive farming on a cultivable land that constitutes only 10% of the total land area.

Added to this situation is the fact that, given the low cost of black labour, investment in fixed capital (machinery, plants, development of new technologies) is limited, while there is a preference to invest in living labour, i.e., manpower. In fact, in the logic of the farm owner, it is much more profitable to take a thousand Negroes from the reserves and send them to till the land with rudimentary tools, for starvation wages, than to buy expensive machinery, install complicated technologies, the expense of which can only be replenished in the long run and be more profitable. This is one of the contradictions of the apartheid system highlighted by the bourgeois economists themselves.

In fact, if this system, ensuring cheap labour, has been allowed to march forward in the phase of capitalist accumulation, it has also introduced into the economy endemic defects and elements of backwardness with which capitalism is today confronted and from which it is difficult to escape by keeping this monstrous edifice on its feet.

We have already noted this situation of relative backwardness of South African agriculture in the previous section on the basis of the data on the GNP and the distribution of the working population, so we will simply add two more figures. The first relates to mechanisation: South Africa, despite owning 47% of the total number of tractors on the entire African continent, and despite the fact that the number of these rose from 1,302 in 1926 to 119,196 in 1960, still employs only 0.9 tractors per hectare, compared to 3 in Italy. The second concerns soil productivity: taking maize, South Africa’s main agricultural product, as a reference, its production is limited to 10 quintals per hectare, compared to 57 for Italy.

However, the described condition persists particularly in the inland regions, which are mainly cultivated with maize and wheat, while in the coastal strip, capital-intensive specialised cultures such as vines, citrus fruits and other fruits are developing.

The main sector of agricultural production remains livestock farming: South Africa produces 4% of the world’s wool, the second largest export product after gold.

As we can see, despite the considerations on the imbalances and elements of backwardness that vitiate South African agriculture, its conditions are extremely prosperous compared to those of an underdeveloped country where the agrarian economy barely manages to escape the limits of mere subsistence.

However, two types of agricultural economy can be clearly distinguished:
1) the capitalist or market-oriented agriculture of white businesses;
2) the simple subsistence agriculture of the reserves.

Regarding this second type of economy, to which the considerations made so far do not refer, we have already given a description when speaking of the Transkei reserve. These areas consist of semi-desert, swampy, roadless territories, etc. and there the Africans who are not immediately used in production survive in conditions of tremendous misery, as well as the women, children, and old men who, exploited to the full in white enterprises, await the end of their miserable existence in the wrecks of the old tribal economy. In these areas, 95% of the production, obtained by primitive means, is consumed locally and consequently they are of no interest from the point of view of the national economy and production.

On the other hand, the first type of economy, i.e. that of white enterprises, directs 90% of its products towards the market and their management is carried out on a capitalist basis. In fact, as per the data previously reported (85% are proletarians and only 7% peasants who work the land themselves), the clearly prevailing relationship is one based on wage labour with an increase in proletarianisation from 488,000 workers in 1918 to 1,025,000 in 1962. Moreover, albeit with the limitations described above, these companies make use of machinery and equipment, urged on by the ample subsidies that the state bestows on them in an attempt to promote the development of agriculture on a modern basis.

With regard to concentration, ¾ of the total number of farms cultivate less than 840 hectares (here we are always speaking of large extensions, since the crops are extensive in character), but they only account for 23% of the total area under cultivation, while the remaining ¼ of these, above 840 hectares, take up 77% of the total area. Thus, production is mainly concentrated in large farms.

Regarding property relations, we note that the landowners are generally also the managers of the businesses, while only 22% of the businesses are leased.

As we can see, the condition from which the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary demand for the division of land traditionally draws sustenance does not exist, i.e. the typical situation of large latifundia fragmented into myriads of plots of land under sharecropping or mixed forms of tenancy by small peasants, or other forms of ownership and tenure of different types but still characteristic of pre-capitalist economies. Instead, the structure is that of large companies run on a capitalist and market-oriented basis. Furthermore, the social structure sees the absence of the small agrarian bourgeoisie, the traditional peasantry, which was always present and played a leading role in the bourgeois-democratic revolution.

On the scene we find only the class of agrarian capitalists, the ‘farmers’, and the class of agricultural wage-earners. The conduct that this situation imposes on the proletariat is in principle to demand not a partition of the farms, but their collective management, which will only be possible through the victory of the social revolution and the establishment of class power. Only the temporary subdivision of some of the most unproductive holdings into small plots to be assigned for management to individual producers is necessary.

The mining industry (today the main mining product is gold) has been the basis of South Africa’s economic expansion.

A national market developed around it for the first time, the first real urban centres sprang up and a communications network was woven. In addition, the mines gave birth to the modern working class: thousands and thousands of Bantu who, torn from a primitive economy, made their arms available on the labour market. They thus represented the impetus for primitive capitalist accumulation, attracting strong foreign investment to South Africa and giving a return that, even if only in part, was immediately reinvested locally.

Until 1950, mining production accounted for the largest percentage of the gross national product compared to other sectors and to this day it still represents a primary factor for the strength and development of the economy, both because of the beneficial effects it has on the balance of payments, given also the relative stability of the gold price, and because it constitutes the most important source of the state’s financial resources. It is true that the exploitation of the mines is in the hands of foreign companies, but production is subject to heavy taxation and, moreover, the state, owner of a portion of the capital, participates directly in the profits.

The extraordinary development of the mining industry in South Africa has been made possible not so much by the exceptional wealth of the subsoil, but by a system that has allowed the mines to be exploited productively from a capitalist point of view. It is known that South Africa is rich in gold, what is less known are the geological and technical difficulties involved in its extraction. These difficulties are only surmountable to the extent that black labour is forced to work under the worst conditions and at minimum wages can be used at discretion.

M.J. Pentz, a bourgeois economist, recalls the natural obstacles, which are: ‘The depth of the workings, the narrowness of the shafts, the excessive heat, the infiltration of water, the large cracks in the rock, etc.’ such obstacles that ‘would make this extraction impossible anywhere else but South Africa’. Indeed, many other countries have large reserves of gold, but nowhere else are there conditions that would make its extraction worthwhile.

In the USA, for example, the cost of producing gold is around $124 an ounce, while its price on the market has been around $35 an ounce since 1970; it is clear that under these conditions mining cannot be started.

It is precisely the apartheid system that ensures the low cost and widespread availability of the black labour force. The development of South African industry is also based on this.

It began around the turn of the century with the emergence of industries ancillary to mining production (manufacturing, explosives, technical branches, etc.) and industries for processing agricultural and livestock products that were springing up along with the first towns. It was during the First World War, however, due to the difficulties around importation in a country that was still essentially agricultural, that the first strong impulse to industrial production occurred.

The black labour force employed in the factories is still equal in number to the white labour force nor does it tend to grow relatively, so the cities are predominantly inhabited by whites while the black population remains in the agrarian areas, employed mainly in agricultural and mining production.

It is with the crisis of 1931-33 that there is a first breakthrough in the race composition of the industrial working class. By 1938, the number of black people was already one and a half times that of whites, while product growth indices reached previously unknown levels. But the real boom occurs in the years from 1945 to 1955, which not coincidentally are also the years when the apartheid system takes its definitive and most congenial form for capitalist interests. Black workers became twice as numerous as white workers in 1945 and three times as many in 1955, while the index of product growth reached exceptional heights, bringing South Africa to the level of an industrially advanced country with a production that accounted for 40% of that of the entire African continent.

It was precisely the introduction of black labour who, working for minimum wages, produced a considerable mass of profits, thus initiating the industrialisation of the country. To this day, South Africa still has very high rates of profit, making it an excellent investment location for capital from all over the world.

The monstrous edifice of apartheid is rooted in the economic structure of modern South African society; it is not a remnant of colonialism, or worse, an expression of backward or pre-capitalist forms such as slavery, or worse still, the result of a ‘retrogressive and reactionary mentality’ of the South African bourgeoisie, to which one would like to counterpose a progressive, enlightened and democratic mentality, more in line with the ‘evolution of the times’. Instead, this structure originates from capitalist development, from the ‘progress’ in the society of capital, so much desired by our opportunists, which is not sprinkled with roses and flowers as these scoundrels would have us believe, but always and everywhere means violence, hunger, sweat, and blood for the oppressed classes.

As mentioned above, apartheid represents the modern and efficient system by which the exploitation of cheap labour is realised in South Africa.

In the first part of the work, it was noted that this system has its first theorisations in the Labour Party, concerned with defending the interests of white workers, followed by a series of measures that were the premise for its construction in full form after the Second World War.

We are not interested here in debunking the ludicrous arguments that the South African bourgeoisie brings in as justification of the apartheid policy, knowingly pursued by a state apparatus ‘firmly resolved to apply it consistently and totally’. The consequence, as we have seen, is the mass deportation of thousands of Negroes, with entire neighbourhoods, declared ‘white areas’, being evacuated and the inhabitants transferred to filthy ghettos on the outskirts of the cities (reserve areas) or to immense concentration camps put up for the occasion and then called Bantustans.

Today, every Negro must possess a pass, which contains, in addition to personal details, permission to reside in a certain place and proof of payment of the Bantu tax; it must be signed by the employer every month, otherwise the Bantu is sent back to the reserve he belongs to. More than a thousand Africans are arrested every day under the pass law.

It is clear that under these conditions, with the masses of unemployed stationed in the reserves behind him and with the prospect of returning there to die with his family, a black worker is forced to sell himself under any conditions, perhaps to sink two thousand metres underground for ten or twelve hours a day, crawling in the tunnels of a mine for a wage that does not even manage to save him from malnutrition.

According to the calculations of the bourgeois experts, the minimum level of ‘poverty’ that allows a family of average composition not to fall into malnutrition is 85 Rand per month. Before the wave of strikes that broke out in 1973, the general level of wages for textile workers in Natal ranged from 5 to 8 Rand per week, while for brickworks workers it was 9 Rand. Sugarcane cutters earned 15 Rand for 30 days work.

A professor from the University of Natal visited the working-class township of Beaumont Wattle Estate, where the workers of the large British company Courtaulds live: ‘The houses are made of mud (...) there are no beds or other furniture in the houses, and the land on which the township lies sinks into the mud. The Company does not grant sickness or pregnancy benefits, does not provide for paid holidays (...) The Zulu worker named Sisva, 32 years old, married with three children, earns 22 Rand a month’. It is like reading ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ in which Engels showed how development, progress, accumulation, economic floridity in capitalism (and he took the ‘magnificent’ England of those times as an example) meant welfare and wealth at one pole of society, inhuman living conditions at the other.

It is clear that this system represents a mine, that is permanently primed, in the subsoil of modern South African society, and it is no coincidence that the state is compelled every day to disproportionately strengthen its frightening repressive apparatus.

We have seen how the modern South African economy developed and is based on a system that ensures the availability of labour at a very low cost. If capitalism wanted to avoid apartheid, it is certain that it would have to replace it with an equally efficient system that continued to ensure this necessary condition for its existence. A consistent improvement in the living conditions of the working class masses is therefore incompatible with the very life of capitalism, in whatever form it may manifest its domination. This is why the proletariat’s struggle to raise its conditions from the misery into which it is thrown cannot but set itself against the very existence of this society.

We have then also seen how apartheid brings with it a series of contradictions, to which we can add the need for a higher level of culture, in the sense of higher qualifications and working skills required in modern industry, and which the rigid mechanism of apartheid, for a thousand reasons, cannot provide for black labour.

Another dilemma posed by some economists concerns the viability of a system which, while providing cheap labour, requires the maintenance of a gigantic repressive apparatus.

But the problem that especially besets the South African bourgeoisie and international capital is the social one.

At a time when the entire continent, and especially Black Africa, is seething with social tensions, it sees the rise of movements that more or less coherently tend to oppose the socio-political order that international capitalism imposes, in a complicated web of interests behind which the social classes and inter-imperialist contrasts are hidden, in this situation the repetition of bloody revolts by the genuine and powerful South African proletariat could be the trigger for a reaction that polarises the interests of the proletarian strata, semi-proletarian and peasant strata, of the dispossessed masses of Africa, unequivocally separating them not only from those of imperialism and from those of the classes that are linked to it, but above all from those of the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois classes, which represent the moderate, a-revolutionary and compromise-prone tendency that always tends to hold the social movement back. Thus South Africa may represent a very powerful hotbed that threatens to set the whole of Africa ablaze, with its modern working class at the cutting edge, linking the national and double revolutions that could spread across Africa and the univocal revolution in the industrialised world.

It is certain that, assuming the victory of a proletarian revolution in South Africa, this would entail the upheaval of the entire continent, which could not fail to bring about a decisive shift in the delineation of the class array throughout the world. This is why the South African question represents a fundamental point that not only South African but international capitalism, and the class party on the other side, cannot fail to take seriously.

From the point of view of capital, the problem is not easy to resolve. We have seen how the current economic set-up cannot do without the large-scale employment of cheap labour. Moreover, in this situation the climate is explosive: the boundary separating the classes, in terms of their living conditions, is very clear; and any attempt to blur it in order to ease the tension is in contradiction with the very existence of the apartheid system itself. The situation is so compromised that even the slightest institutional change could be the trigger for a frightening reaction.

A substantial layer of the petty bourgeoisie or black working class aristocracy that could effectively play the role of social preservation does not exist and cannot develop under these conditions. Capitalism, to ease the tension, cannot but move in this direction, but the difficulties are not insignificant. Forming a Negro middle class could only sustain itself on hefty international subsidies, granted in the common interest of blocking any ferment that infects the social environment outside.

There exists for the proletariat, especially in the absence of the class party, the danger of falling prey to the petty-bourgeois positions of movements such as the South African Congress, which, relying on the coloured middle classes, also has a certain following among the workers. This movement, to which the CPSA also adheres, demands an end to segregation, the democratic state, and pushes the watchword of racial equality along with the illusory and ultra-reactionary one of ‘class equality’. It proposes a solution in terms of race which sidesteps the class question whereas, as we have seen, the racial question is merely the guise in which the class question appears.

The latter, on the contrary, is posed in terms of the conquest of economic and social conditions that will lift the working class out of the situation of misery and hunger into which it is thrown by capitalism, and not so much in terms of acquiring legal equality before the state. This struggle of the black proletariat can only, outside of pacifist perspectives, lead to the necessary outcome of the revolutionary struggle for the destruction of the capitalist system and the establishment of a non-democratic regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a struggle whose outcome naturally cannot be separated from that of the world proletariat.

Paraphrasing the buzzwords that agitate and inflame the struggle of the oppressed masses of the black proletariat, but which all too easily lend themselves to petty-bourgeois deviation, we therefore reiterate our classic positions: the ‘Negro state’ can only mean ‘proletarian dictatorship’; ‘throw the whites overboard’: ‘death to the exploitative capitalists’; ‘liberation of black people’: ‘emancipation of the working class from the capitalist yoke’.

All this presupposes, and we will spell it out clearly, the constitution, strengthening, and extension of genuine proletarian organisations, free from pacifist and petty-bourgeois influence, willing to defend, with arms in hand, the interests of the class, and above all the enucleation within it of the conscious and organised vanguard: the POLITICAL PARTY, without which the assault on the Pretoria regime will be impossible or will result in a bloody defeat.

The following work is part of the Party’s broader study of the economic and social development of African countries, and the national and anti-colonial struggles that still affect many of the continent’s countries today. It is not an academic dissertation on the subject, but a timely reconfirmation of the positions that form the party’s theoretical and battle baggage. It is through the analysis of the correlations that bind the classes to the historical and economic process that the party can give its watchword, its direction. Wherever colonial power is to be overthrown or there is a struggle for national independence, the proletarian class will have to set itself the same objectives, properly delimited in terms of military and political organisation, as the radical bourgeoisie, expecting that the latter will itself become the enemy the minute the old power has been overthrown (or even before). Where, on the contrary, there is no problem of double revolution, where the bourgeois class has already crystallised its way of producing and organising society, there the watchword can only be that of proletarian revolution, a univocal revolution against the power of capital, its historical enemy.

The decisive basis for Rhodesia’s economic development was the vast investments that the British South Africa Company made in the late 1800s. The South Africa Company, with capital made available by British imperialism, had embarked on a vast colonisation project in the territories of present-day Rhodesia and Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia. The project hinged on the search for precious minerals, a search that had yielded profitable returns in South Africa and seemed likely to yield the same good results here. It was precisely the overestimation of the Rhodesian gold reserves that kickstarted the Company’s subsequent investments, aimed at amortising the expenses previously incurred.

The deposits in Rhodesia, on the other hand, turned out to be poorer: in 1910, in fact, while the profit of the eleven most important mines in Johannesburg reached almost seven million pounds, that of the ten most important Rhodesian ones reached only about 614,000 pounds. The Company thus embarked on a vast investment plan, with a special focus on the construction of railways to develop the land it owned. To the same end, the emergence of a white agrarian bourgeoisie was promoted that would be able to exploit the Company’s assets, land holdings, and mining concessions. This provoked considerable European immigration and especially after 1902, small enterprises dedicated to mining exploitation against payment of a fee became widespread. Between 1901 and 1911, immigration doubled the white population from 11,000 to 23,000. The development of mining was accompanied by that of agriculture, the basis of the country’s economy and a developing sector to meet the increased demand brought about by the sudden immigration.

Until the Second World War, ⅔ of the active Europeans belonged to the agrarian bourgeoisie.

The manufacturing industry is still virtually absent in 1923, there is only a numerically negligible small manufacturing bourgeoisie, which is also linked to the agrarian bourgeoisie and big international capital. White wage-earners, concentrated in the mining sector, in transport (railways) and in colonial administration, are also important. Important to emphasise, because it is a characteristic feature of Rhodesia that the settlement of white workers occurred after capitalist development and not before it. What this entails here is the absence of the phenomenon, already seen in South Africa, of the ‘poor whites’: Europeans expelled from or not absorbed into the production cycle, who form, during the period of development of South African industry, the reserve army of capital. On the contrary, in Rhodesia, the bourgeoisie was forced to grant high wages to attract skilled labour.

The African population was still organised on a tribal level in small rural communities. The land, superabundant, is not an alienable asset, cultivation is of the fallow type, cultivated one year and then left fallow the following year to restore its fertility (The method was commonly used in Europe until the discovery of chemical fertilisers and the transformation of agriculture on a capitalist basis).

A close relationship binds the peasant tribesman to the community; he leaves the village for occasional work, separating himself from his family and community, but in a close bond that he is concerned to maintain by sending gifts and part of his wage with the prospect of returning even after a few years; in short, it is a kind of ‘old age insurance’ that the African contracts with the village community. Because of this, as well as obviously because of the still objectively backward conditions of the development of Rhodesian capitalism, the African of the early 1900s cannot be identified as a proletarian, supporting himself only by means of his hands.

If this is the general situation of the black peasantry, no better is the situation of the African middle and petty bourgeoisie, numerically and economically insignificant, so much so that before the Act for the distribution of land to Africans, they could only acquire 45,000 acres while Europeans owned 31 million.

The Rhodesian political structure in the 1930s was based on the so-called ‘separate development’ or ‘two pyramids’ policy, which tended towards the creation of two separate types of development for whites and Africans, but which evidently only represents an attempt by international capitalism and the European agrarian bourgeoisie to bring about a stable form of exploitation of the black labour force.

The Company promoted the emergence and development of a white agrarian bourgeoisie, which tended to seize an ever-greater part of the land for speculative purposes. It is clear that land became all the more valuable the greater the profitability of its productive use, a profitability that was linked to the expanding demand for agricultural products.

There are therefore three problems that the landowners have to face: to prevent even the possibility of competition from Africans; to develop the domestic market and thus favour the development of a national manufacturing industry; to transform Africans from small peasants into agricultural wage-earners in their employ.

Before the First World War, these problems were answered by a series of laws and amendments establishing:
1) the expropriation of land, which is accompanied by a series of measures to encourage the expropriated peasants to remain where they are as tenants, by commuting the rent into labour services;
2) a tax on huts that would have forced Africans to work as agricultural labourers for an average of one to three months a year;
3) the introduction of a pass through which labour could be directed to where it was needed.

In the industrial field, the international companies now tended, after the initial investments, to ‘follow demand’, thus creating the first frictions with the nascent manufacturing industry, which was on the contrary intent on expanding capital investments that could facilitate its growth. This conflict of interests was to be the basis for the attempts of the national bourgeoisie to change the economic structure in the 1950s, aimed at creating a national base that could disengage itself from international economic power.

White wage-earners, as we mentioned, could count on high wages, even higher than those of US and British proletarians, due to the strong demand for skilled labour. This explains how strong their bargaining power and their trade union organisations were. It is clear that this ‘aristocratic’ condition of labour induces the bourgeois orientation of the action these workers will take in the course of history. They have every interest in perpetuating their privileged status over Africans and are therefore determined to prevent a stable black urban population from which capital can draw cheap labour, just as they are against the creation of educational and professional facilities for Africans.

Since the First World War, the economic power of the national white bourgeoisie and wage-earners has grown, as the conflict and its aftermath had seen a shortage of skilled labour and raw material stocks. It is from this period onwards that one must speak of a coalition between these white national classes. This position of strength vis-à-vis international capitalism continued throughout the 1920s, so that in the years of the great crisis, the coalition attained substantial political power, which crystallised in the recognition by the British of a responsible Rhodesian government. This solution, which certainly did not represent independence, was, moreover, opposed by the international companies who were pressing for incorporation into the Union of South Africa, an incorporation that would have given them more stable control over the Rhodesian economic structure.

The impetus that led to independent government was based on the national bourgeoisie’s fear of being forced to submit again to British imperial control, as well as not to weaken the still precarious position of the white classes: African labour tended to emigrate en masse to the South, where wages were higher, thus causing an immigration of ‘poor whites’. The achievement of this goal obviously did not represent an undisputed supremacy of these classes, which were objectively still dependent on international capitalism. The arrangement in the 1930s was therefore one of compromise, which sought to take into account conflicting demands, and which was paid for entirely by the peasantry and the nascent African proletariat.

The government moved in two directions to favour the national bourgeoisie: capital investment and strengthening the bargaining power of this class in the raw materials market. Thus, numerous public works were started and completed: roads, state enterprises, the Electricity Supply Commission’s power stations, the Rhodesian Iron and Steel Commission’s foundries and steelworks and the Cotton Industry Board’s factories, as well as numerous raw material processing plants.

With regard to the expansion of the labour market with the Land Apportionment Act, the theorisation that the two racial groups would not compete with each other was realised. Land for permanent African settlements was strictly limited, a limitation that inevitably led to the transformation of the fallow cultivation system, with the Africans forced to switch to continuous cultivation. To ‘encourage’ this shift, land was divided into ‘permanent arable’ and ‘permanent pasture’.

Given the backwardness of the cultivation system in place in the villages (it was at this time that the use of the plough was introduced and became widespread), this sudden quantitative shrinkage of exploitable land inevitably led to a qualitative decline, the land rapidly losing its fertility. The basis for the survival of the peasantry was eliminated, so that masses of men were forced to move to the cities or onto the white farms in the hope of being able to rent out their labour power to survive. But even their flow was tightly regulated with the Native Registration Act of 1936, which worsened the pass law by distributing the labour supply amongst the various capitalist sectors, thus keeping wages at survival level.

If the peasantry was being crushed, the same fate befell the nascent African agrarian bourgeoisie, whose rise was contained by reaffirming the traditional rule that land in African areas was not alienable. In these areas land could not be purchased, but no better was the situation in the Purchase Areas where, at least in theory, land could be bought and sold: firstly, land was allocated by the government by choosing it in areas far from markets, railway lines, and main roads; secondly, they accounted for only 8% of the country’s total arable land area and their transferability was subject to many restrictions; thirdly, the government hindered the granting of credit in every way, so that even if the market had been freer, the lack of money would in any case have curbed the development of the African bourgeoisie.

Similar restrictions were placed on commerce, prohibiting Negroes from buying and renting premises in European areas, thus confining them to reserves and to poorer markets.

The close coalition between white workers and the national bourgeoisie led also in the industrial sector to the crushing of African wage-earners, accentuating the better conditions of European workers, perpetuating the shortage of skilled labour. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1936 excluded black people from the definition of a wage-earner, but paradoxically it established equal wages and equal regulatory conditions between Europeans and Africans, so that under no circumstances would an employer hire a unskilled Negro worker when he could, for the same price, hire a skilled white worker. This is the practical realisation of the ‘parallel’ policy, the white agrarian class set against the black, the white wage-earners to perpetuate their position of privilege set against the African wage-earners.

The economic and political order that had been taking shape in the 1930s could not but have, in the light of what we have described, two major flaws: on the one hand the process of industrialisation clashed with a more than stagnant domestic demand: a strong increase in population was counterbalanced by a decrease in the productivity of the peasantry, so that the per capita income had stagnated, a sign of an increase in subsistence production only; secondly, the destruction of the hope of ‘old-age insurance’, which, as we have seen, tied the peasants/wage-earners to the land and the village, increasingly pushed Africans to emigrate to the industrial zones, bumping up against the protective curtain imposed by the whites.

It was seen in the last issue how throughout the 1930s, Rhodesian industrialisation was held back by a lack of domestic demand, while the productivity of the African peasantry declined and settled at subsistence level.

The Second World War was the boost that acted as a stimulus to the market and allowed the economy to expand. Commodities that had previously been imported became unobtainable, thus creating a large market for domestic industries; metals such as chromium and asbestos rose sharply in price. White farmers were able to increase their production given the global food shortage. But the main impetus for expansion was the government’s joint programme with Britain to turn Rhodesia into a military base for training British pilots.

This strong economic expansion created the opportunity to initiate the first real fixed capital investment plan: existing steel and cotton spinning plants were expanded and new ones built; it was this vast series of investments that led to the development of the still embryonic manufacturing industry.

The war had opened the door to economic development, and its end did not cause a return to the previous situation thanks to the country’s monopoly of chrome and asbestos mines, materials in increasing demand on the international market. This was accompanied by tobacco production, which in the post-war period was stimulated by the restrictions imposed in the UK: between 1945-48, production tripled in quantity and quadrupled in value. This development led to an increase in the number of producers from less than 1,000 to 2,670 over the same period, greatly increasing immigration; this increased the demand for housing and services, and the number of African wage-earners rose from 254,000 in 1936 to 377,000 in 1946, to over 600,000 in 1956.

This was in addition, after 1940, to the growing interest of international capitalism, which progressively shifted its scope and network of interests away from South Africa – where the national bourgeoisie had come to power – to Rhodesia; foreign investment rose from £13.5 million in 1947 to double that in 1949, rising to £50.7 million in 1951.

This ‘detour’ of international capital is essentially what promoted the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. With the expansion of the market, the ample labour reserves of Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), and the financial means that Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) could bring ‘as dowry’, the possibility of the Federation surviving and developing, precisely in the light of this massive international intervention, was not at all utopian, on the contrary, up until 1958, when the first symptoms of a new stagnation were felt, the Federation prospered remarkably.

From 1901 to 1950 the number of African labourers had steadily increased despite the progressive contraction of wages; this was because – as we have seen – the white agrarians had engaged in a ‘crusade’ against the black peasantry to turn them into agricultural labourers. Now, in the post-war period, for the white tobacco farmers, it was a matter of finding more land, and this could only mean a new massive displacement of the African peasantry away from the countryside, onto the farms and into the industries. With the full implementation of the Land Apportionment Act came the first real boost to the formation of the proletariat, of those masses of men deprived – this time for good – of those material reserves that the link with the rural community could still offer. In 1948 there were 300,000 Africans still occupying land whose exploitation was reserved for Europeans, in the post-war years 85,000 African families were relocated through mass deportations to the Native Reserves under the provisions of the Land Act. Forced deportations as in South Africa on the one hand, the drastic reduction in the number of heads of cattle that could be owned on the other, strangled the economy and the residual investments of the Negro peasantry. The forced entry into the proletarian ranks at starvation wages, stimulated cohesion among the African masses and made them materially aware of the continuous deterioration of their living conditions as well as the illusory nature of the ‘old age insurance’ contracted with the communities.

This led to a major wave of strikes, and solidified the commonality of interests that existed between the proletariat and African agricultural wage-earners. The common interest in fighting against white bourgeois power was the basis on which the nascent nationalist movement expanded.

If this was the first of the fundamental changes in the Rhodesian class structure of the years around 1950, it was countered by the rise of a manufacturing capitalist class as distinct from the agrarian one.

The contribution of the manufacturing industry to national income rose from 9% in the late 1930s to 15% in the early 1950s and 18% in the 1960s. This process inevitably led to the concentration of production and thus to the crushing of small enterprises, most of which still relied on the family-run method. There was thus a transition from small, almost artisanal production to the large mechanised production of large joint-stock companies. In 1938 in fact, enterprises with a gross output of more than 50,000 pounds covered less than 8% of total production, while in 1957 they covered more than ⅓ of it. The introduction of machines and the division of the complex production cycle into simple tasks differentiated the new manufacturing industry from the pre-war one. The reduction of complex labour into simple labour also allowed the utilisation of the relatively unskilled African labour force; at the same time, the large industrial centres favoured the stable concentration of proletarians in the cities.

Heavy industry, processing of local agricultural products, and low-cost consumer goods, these are the three main branches of production.

If the emergence of an African proletariat and the rise and consolidation of a manufacturing industry are the most important data of the years around 1950, the progressive changes in the extractive and agrarian fields should also be noted. Roughly speaking, the extractive industry, despite its concentration, is already in the downward phase of its cycle, while agriculture, thanks to the production of tobacco that began in the post-war period and especially thanks to the possibilities offered by the international market, is strengthening and increasing its production.

The national income had received contributions from mining to the tune of 25% in 1938, while in the early 1950s it had already fallen to 10%, falling inexorably to a paltry 5% in the 1960s. Nevertheless, if all production collapsed, one must note strong imbalances within it: gold production declined sharply, but asbestos, chromium, and coal marked new increases. In addition to the ongoing concentration in the manufacturing sector, capitalist development granted no respite for mining either, the small prospectors, the small companies based on concessions, were swept away by the ever more onerous costs of extracting minerals, so that in the 1950s the sector was already almost entirely in the hands of just four companies: the mining plants went from 1,750 in 1935 to 700 in 1947 and to 300 in 1956.

If mining production is in decline, the opposite trend is found in agriculture, the value of whose output is ten times higher in 1958 than in 1937. Tobacco cultivation drags the whole sector along, by the 1940s it was already the most important of Rhodesia’s export commodities. Tobacco soon surpassed the production of maize, a product typical of southern African agriculture and the primary element of the African diet. If therefore maize production meant production for the domestic market, tobacco cultivation marked the decisive orientation towards the foreign market, strengthening the agrarian farmers and ensuring that to an increasing extent their interests were no longer chained to the process of industrialisation of the country, the basis for the expansion of the demand for agricultural commodities. Tobacco cultivation, moreover, by its nature prevented the use of machines, increasing the need for African labour.

While the growth of the national components of the Rhodesian bourgeoisie partly changes the framework of the economy in their favour, the control that international capital continues to operate over much of the economy itself cannot be ignored. Rhodesia still remains tied, through the Companies, to the interests of international imperialism, particularly British, US, and South African. Until the Second World War, these interests were mainly based on increasing the value of land, on mining rights, and on railways, but following the conflict, the tentacles of the international economy infiltrated virtually every sector, especially the non-agricultural ones. This change in the economic policy of the Companies was due to several factors: the mining rights and railways had been bought by the government in 1933 and 1939, economic development largely favoured investment in the industrial sector, interest in controlling chrome and asbestos production increased, as did control of the daily press; all factors which, as well as increasing profits, tended to re-establish complete political control with respect to the increased power of the national bourgeois classes. The Anglo American Corporation group (comprising four large companies: Tanganyika Concessions, De Beers, British South Africa Company and the A.A.C. itself) whose economic base is mining exploitation in South Africa, Zambia and Katanga, as well as in Rhodesia itself; also controls the production of Rhodesian coal, ferrochrome, and cement, and part of the production of iron and steel, and has moreover the monopoly of the Rhodesian daily press. As far as agriculture is concerned, it invests heavily in citrus and sugarcane plantations.

The asbestos industry is 90% controlled by the British company Turner and Newall; it also occupies a leading place in the asbestos-cement industry. Other companies have a strong presence in gold mining, cattle breeding, and tobacco production. As far as the manufacturing sector is concerned, it is noticeable that more than a third of the fifty major British manufacturing companies have, as early as the 1950s-60s, direct interests in Rhodesia. This means that the presence of international capital can be found everywhere in the sector: a 1960 statistic concerning present-day Rhodesia (formerly Southern Rhodesia), shows that ⅔ of gross profits on sales ended up in the pockets of companies controlled by foreign capital.

Thus, taking stock of the situation on the eve of the reform programme that would be launched in the 1950s, it should be remembered that the white petty bourgeoisie was overwhelmed by capitalist concentration, whereas white wage-earners retained their strong bargaining power (towards the end of the 1950s the average wage of a white worker was well above £1,000 per annum), black workers were still blocked from access to the most skilled jobs, the aspirations of the African petty bourgeoisie were stifled, on the one hand by the trend towards capital concentration, on the other, in the agricultural field, by credit restrictions.

Thus, if the structure of the 1930s had failed to prevent the emergence and growth of the Negro proletariat – and by no means could it have done so given capitalist development – it had in any case prevented the rise of a petty and middle bourgeois class, something which prompted these social strata to join the African proletariat and peasantry and support their nationalist aspirations, in opposition to the white classes.