(Part 1) Henning van Aswegen. Abstract: Communist Party of South Africa, CPSA, Communism in South Africa, Socialism, Trotskyism, Leninism in South Africa.
South Africa has the dubious honour of being one of the first countries in the world with an organised, central and constituted communist party.
On 30 July and 1 August 1921 fourteen delegates, all of them White, gathered in Cape Town to formally constitute the Communist Party of South Africa – the CPSA. The fourteen delegates represented various smaller socialist and communist groups, labour unions, and political gatherings, some with no more than fifteen members. This founding meeting of the CPSA was preceded by visits to Moscow and talks with the Comintern on how to form and establish a communist party, and what a communist constitution would look like. The Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) changed its name to the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1953, enabling Nelson Mandela to claim in court during the Rivonia Trial on 11 June 1964 that he never was a member of the SACP.
Prelude
The formation and establishment of a communist party in South Africa has a long prelude and must be read within the political context of South Africa’s turbulent history. The defeated Boer leaders of the 2nd Anglo-Boer War reorganised politically in the period after 1902, resulting in three political associations: Het Volk (Transvaal), Orangia Unie (Free State), and the South African Party (SAP) in the Cape Province. Ironically the founder of the Orangia Unie and the first Prime Minister of the Orange River Colony, Advocate Abraham Fischer, was the grandfather of the leader of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in the 1960’s, Abram Fischer. In 1907 a group of White Marxists abandoned cooperation with the three Boer political parties and formed the Labour Representative Committee (LRC), with Bill Andrews (an Irishman as Secretary General). The LRC absorbed and merged smaller groups, such as the Trades and Labour Council (TLC), the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the German Vorwärts Klub (GVK), the Italian Socialist Club (ISC), the Jewish Socialist Society (JSS), and the Friends of the Russian Freedom Society (FRFS).
Bill Andrews and the Labour Representative Committee then decided to make common ground with a group of social democrats in Cape Town, and together they formed the South African Labour Party (SALP) in January 1910. Bill Andrews was elected Secretary General of SALP and even became a member of the South African Unionist Parliamant in 1912. The Marxists and Social Democrats were an uneasy alliance within the SALP, and the group was plagued by in-fighting, factionalism and fractured Politburo meetings. Andrews and his Marxists concentrated on organising the militant extreme left wing trade unions, and sporadic strikes took place in the Cape Peninsula, characterised by extreme violence and street fighting. Andrews organised his famed ‘Pickhandle Brigade’ – a gang of street fighters specialising in the breaking up of political meetings of rival groups in Cape Town.
As more and more Afrikaans farmers were forced off their land because of bankruptcy caused by the British imperialist ‘scorched earth’ policy during the Anglo-Boer war, discontent and hatred of South Africa’s new colonial rulers and oppressors grew. The Afrikaners were forced to join the ranks of the growing industrial labour force of unskilled workers, consisting of mainly Black workers in the country’s gold and uranium mines. Bill Andrews and his Marxists turned their attention to wooing these discontented Afrikaners. Their sole objective at this stage was to create a revolutionary situation by aggravating the tense relations between Afrikaans-speaking White mineworkers and English-speaking mining magnates. Despite living and working in South Africa, most of the mining magnates and their wives held on to their British passports and travel documents.
The former Boer General Louis Botha and his South African Party (SAP) held a slim majority in the colonial Parliament. Contrary to Botha’s opinion and public statments, the poor and defeated Afrikaans-speaking Whites felt that Botha and the SAP did not represent their interests, and did nothing to prevent English Colonialist oppression and subjugation. Tension and aggravation increased and played right into the hands of Marxists, creating ideal conditions to recruit the mineworkers, both Black and White to their revolutionary cause. Despite later Communist chronicler’s attempts to prove that Comrade Bill Andrews and other Red leaders tried to represent only Black interests in those days, the Marxists concentrated mainly on the White mineworkers and their grievances.
The outbreak of ‘the Great War,’ the First World War on 28 July 1914 galvanised South African Communists to declare that “wars benefit only capitalist monopolists, armament manufacturers and the enemies of the working class.” Edward Roux, S.P. Bunting and Colin Wade formed a ‘Stop the War’ Committee, which replaced the moribound Labour Representative Commmitee (LRC), and then expanded into International Socialist League (ISL) in 1915, based in Cape Town. The ISL elected Comrade Bill Andrews as Chairman, and became the direct forerunner of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) which was formed six years later.
The ISL was formerly constituted on 22 September 1915 and elected the following members to its first Politburo:
Bill Andrews – Secretary General, J.A. Clark (MPC) – Sub Secretary General, A.F. Crisp – Sub SC, G Weinstock – Treasurer, David Ivon Jones – Secretary, S.P. Bunting – Administrator, A.B. Dunbar – Financial Officer and W. Light – Administrator.
The South African ISL immediately sought affiliation to the Zimmerwald Group, also known as the Berne International Socialist Commission in Switzerland. The ISL also applied for membership to the Third International, based in Moscow – a combined “force of Marxism” comprising the Russian Communist Party, the Italian Communist Party and a group of left-wing Swiss Socialists. The first Director General of the Third International was none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Vladimir Lenin.
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