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1981 - 19874

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Author: search.filters.author.Lodge, TomStart date: 1980End date: 1989

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    United Democratic Front: Leadership and ideology
    (1987-08) Lodge, Tom
    The UDF is essentially a federation linking a large and heterodox collection of organisations varying in function, size, and popular impact. It is strongest in the Eastern Cape, traditionally the stronghold of the ANC, with which many local UDF leaders are historically associated. Class and communal cleavages as well as the presence of rivals with a popular following, make the UDF comparatively weaker in Cape Town and Durban. In the industrial heartland of the Transvaal, the UDF is undoubtedly paramount, but the sheer size of the urban centres, their social complexity, and the uncertainties of the UDF' s relationship with a well-established trade union movement, make its own capacity for marshalling disciplined support questionable. In the Transvaal, to a greater extent than in its other four main regions, the UDF has come to depend upon a tacit alliance with an increasingly politicised yet politically independent trade union movement. Any analysis of the UDF, though, should not be limited to the bureaucratic boundaries of its often patchy organisation, for the UDF functions more in the fashion of a social movement than a deliberately contrived political machine. With this consideration in mind, two questions need examining. Which social constituencies does the UDF represent? Is it possible to perceive in the UDF's ideological discourse the interests or concerns of particular social classes?
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    The Poqo insurrection
    (1986-02) Lodge, Tom
    This paper is about one of the least successful of South Africa's revolutionary movements. Several thousand Poqo insurrectionists were arrested during the course of the 1960s. The vast majority of these were detained and convicted before they had had a chance to strike a single blow. Fewer than thirty deaths can be attributed to the activities of Poqo adherents of whom nearly the same number were sentenced to death in South African courts. The history of the Poqo uprisings is a history without a climax. Its final act takes place in the courtrooms not the barricades. Perhaps for this reason the Poqo story has lacked a chronicler. This paper is an attempt to compensate for the perfunctory treatment Poqo has received from historians. It provides a narrative of Poqo's development and a description of its social following. It then attempts to assess Poqo's historical significance.
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    The creation of a mass movement: Strikes and defiance, 1950-1952
    (1981-08) Lodge, Tom
    During the 1940's under the stimuli of industrial action, communal protest and passive resistance and an increasingly repressive social and political climate, the African National Congress's leadership had reached the point of embracing a strategy based on mass action : the strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience entailed in the Programme adopted in Bloemfontein in 1949. The form this programme would assume was indefinite : the Programme of Action was a statement of principle rather than a detailed strategem. But the months following the December conference allowed little time for careful planning. In 1950 the Government began its first major offensive against organized African opposition : the Suppression of Communism Act was directed not solely at the Communist Party and left-wing multiracial trade union groupings; it sanctioned the persecution of any individual group or doctrine intended to bring "about any political, industrial, social or economic change ... by the promotion of disturbance or disorder, by unlawful acts" or "encouragement of feelings of hostility between the European and non-European races of the Union.
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    Class conflict, communal struggle and patriotic unity: The Communist Party of South Africa during the Second World War
    (1985-10-07) Lodge, Tom
    The years of the Second World War witnessed a revival in the fortunes of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). At the beginning of the war the Party's following numbered less than 300, it s influence in the trade unions was negligible, it was isolated from other political organisations among blacks, while it s efforts with whites had succeeded neither in checking the growth of fascism or Afrikaner nationalism nor in building class unity. Six years later the Party could count it s adherents in thousands rather than hundreds, it was capable of winning white local government elections, and its members presided over the largest-ever African trade union movement as well as contributing significantly to the leadership of the African and Indian Congresses. From 1945 knowledge of the Party’s development becomes vital for any understanding of the mainstream of black politics in South Africa. This paper will examine and attempt to explain the wartime expansion in the Communist Party's influence, first by referring to the social and economic conditions as well as the overall political environment of the time, and then by discussing the Party's policies and strategies’ CPSA responses to three different sets of movements or organisations will be discussed: movements of the urban poor, of peasants, and of labour. The paper will conclude with an evaluation of the Party's role and development during the period.