Africana Library
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Item Stay-aways and the black working class since the second World War : The evaluation of a strategy(1979-04) Webster, E.C.There is a widespread belief, among some who hope for change in South Africa, that if only all Blacks withdrew their labour, the whole structure of South Africa would collapse. It is a subject which has received little academic attention. It is my intention in this paper to examine this notion in three parts.. In Part I a brief history of stay-aways between 1950 and 1961 will be given. In Part II its reemergence in Soweto will be examined. In Part III the limitations of the stay-away as a tactic of working-class action will be discussed and contrasted with the more wide-spread plantbased action of the 1970s. (This is not meant to imply that limitations do not exist in plant-based action.) The Namibian general strike of 1971-2 is excluded from this analysis as its relative degree of "success" demonstrates the uniqueness of that situation - viz. the existence of a reasonably self-sufficient rural base to which striking workers could withdraw. Yet even in Namibia workers could ultimately, says Moorsom, not escape the major contradiction in their strategy "that although access to peasant resources considerably expanded their power to prolong resistance, they could no longer, as a matter of inescapable necessity, opt out of wage-labour indefinitely - the platform of the strike committee embodied a tacit acknowledgement of the irrevocable necessity of wage-labour."Item Progressive politics and crises of urban reproduction in South Africa: The cases of rent and transport(1985-09-23) McCarthy, J.Useful, although not necessary, points of departure for this paper are some comments that emerged in two recent contributions to progressive political debate at the University of Natal. These two contributions are Erwin's address to the University Forum on "Trade Unions and Politics" and Freund et al's contribution to the South African Labour Bulletin and the Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa Seminar on the "November Stayaway". In both of these presentations there appeared to be an enhanced interest, on the part of intellectuals of the progressive labour movement, in what I shall term as South Africa's urban reproductive crises. We have become accustomed to hearing from both liberal-reformists and radical-liberals about such crises in South Africa. These latter groups, of course, have addressed the issues in a different manner to Erwin and Freund et al because of their differing political priorities, but they have persistently addressed them all the same. The fact that we are now increasingly hearing from trade union-linked intellectuals on living place issues, however, is a fact that I take as a significant departure in the course of South Africa's urban and regional politics.Item The state and economic development in South Africa(1975-03) Kaplan, D.In an earlier paper, I stressed the conceptual inadequacies prevalent in both the liberal analyses of the State in the process of South African capitalist development and in the ‘new’ literature which departs from the liberal paradigm.(1) To repeat the critique, the latter literature "is centred around the question of labour policy and is designed to show, in contradistinction to the liberal analysis, that racial and labour policy has been functional to the interests of ‘capital’ in South African economic development. Although centred on the question of labour, the latter literature has made some specific statements concerning the State and has, at least implicitly, derived a theory of capitalist development for the South African case. On both these questions, I would suggest that this literature has been largely incorrect, and this has resulted from an inadequate conceptual framework... This paper is primarily designed to give additional substance to this critique, in a number of ways.Item "Providing for the legitimate labour requirements of employers": Secondary industry, commerce and the state in South Africa during the 1950's and 1960's(1984-10-29)It is government policy to provide for the legitimate labour requirements of employers. Marxist discussions of the South African State during the 1950s and '60s have emphasised the ways in which, contrary to liberal expectations, this ideological promise was in fact fulfilled. The striking economic growth rates of the 1960s - 9.3% between 1963 and 1968 - at a time of intensified political repression, are prima facie evidence of their case that overall, Apartheid did not damage the cause of economic development in South Africa. The migrant labour system, influx control policies and the state's refusal to permit the registration of African trade unions, are shown to have reproduced an abundant supply of cheap black labour on which the economy thrived. However, there are limitations in examining the relationship between Apartheid and economic development in solely synchronic terms, as an outcome rather than an ongoing process. This sort of approach is typically disinterested in the relationship between the original intentions of Apartheid and its actual outcomes, and the factors interposing between the two. As a result, by implication, Apartheid during the '50s and '60s is depicted as if a relatively static, nationally homogenous policy, a political 'fait accompli'. (Thus, it is usually only when 'revisionist' analyses move on to the 1970s that the foundations and methods of state policy are examined for signs of vacillation and change). Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is cast largely as the passive beneficiary of this system, having rapidly "learned to live with the pass laws, migrant labour and native Reserves" and whose political and ideological protests were at best short-lived. A closer look at the '50s and '60s reveals, however, an uneven combination of continuities and shifts in state practice. Neither these continuities nor changes are self-explanatory. They indicate the fluctuating balance of forces - political, ideological and economic - which either kept Apartheid policies on the course intended by its practitioners, or deflected their outcomes to the point where the negation of fundamental principles of Apartheid produced some significant changes in the intentions and methods of state policy. Moreover, the bourgeoisie was an active participant in this process, rather than its quiescent beneficiary. This paper focuses on the role of secondary industry and commerce in particular, in shaping the production of some key aspect of Apartheid policy. Both the direct political interventions of organised commerce and industry, and the indirect political pressure exerted by the weight of routine industrial and commercial practice, evidence an ongoing struggle with the state over the distribution, composition and accessibility of the black labour force in secondary industry and commerce. This discussion thus sheds a less functionalist light on the relationship between economic and political interests. Apartheid neither automatically nor uniformly promoted capitalist interests. The paper begins with a brief description of some of the declared intentions of Apartheid policy during the 1950s. It then shows how, in the context of the relative stasis and ultimate decline of the manufacturing sector in the 1950s, secondary industry and commerce were (partly) responsible for subverting some of these original goals. The last part of the paper then identifies the resultant shift in declared state policy, evident by the early 1960s, and discusses the impact of secondary industry and commerce upon these policies during the boom conditions of the 1960s.