economic clause [of the Freedom Charter], I looked at it and I thought, no no no. This is not what I’m about. Now, whether that was in my head … or whether it was reflecting all the stuff I’d learnt in Europe, in England, in the Labour Party and all that, I can’t recall. And who knows how one’s consciousness works … But there’s no doubt that the independent policy-making of the Party influenced all of us. How much, and to what degree, what the mechanisms were, I don’t think I’m able to say. But it was there (Turok interview, 31 May 2014).
Bernstein (1999: 159) points out that ‘nationalisation is not necessarily a gateway to socialism’, making the example of the then nationalised railways and electricty supply, embedded within a system of white supremacy and gross economic injustice.
Bernstein’s second point, either missed or little appreciated by most commentators, including ourselves until now, is that, contrary to general belief among Congress activists, ‘debates over economic policy and the relative merits of capitalism and socialism were everyday stuff … The debate over the economic clauses of the Charter was not much more than an additional element in an ongoing debate’ (Bernstein 1999: 160).
In a revealing response to Niël Barnard (the apartheid-era head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service) and others who visited Mandela in prison, when asked about the nationalisation policy of the ANC, Mandela’s reply was that: ‘Nationalisation might occur for certain “monopoly” industries but that he had always considered [the Freedom Charter] a blueprint for African-style capitalism’ (Harvey 2001: 143). Of course, one has to remember his audience on this occasion. However, while some may stress the ‘capitalism’, we would point to the ‘African’ style; surely he had in mind a more collective, socialised form of economic organisation?
In Season of Hope, Alan Hirsch (2005) has pointed to a line in a 1956 article by Mandela, apparently supportive of the development of a black bourgeois class, in which he proposes that the ANC has always been a party of private enterprise, black business development and a market-oriented party. Rather than shifting to the right as some have suggested, the ANC was simply reverting to its pro-market, pro-private enterprise roots. We do not accept this argument. In our interpretation, Mandela’s 1956 article, published in the journal Liberation and reproduced by Thomas Karis and Gwendolen Carter (1977), explicitly legitimates nationalisation of the wealth of the country, consistent with the provisions of the Freedom Charter. His arguments for a multi-class alliance led by working people to establish democratic governance in the interests of the whole society is perfectly consistent with a social democratic approach. Indeed, the stress on democracy is a characteristic feature of such an approach. Here are the relevant sections quoted in full:
The workers are the principal force upon which the democratic movement should rely, but to repel the savage onslaughts of the Nationalist Government and to develop the fight for democratic rights it is necessary that the other classes and groupings be joined … The cruel and inhuman manner with which they are treated, their dreadful poverty and economic misery, make them potential allies of the democratic movement. The Non-European traders and businessmen are also potential allies, for in hardly any other country in the world has the ruling class made conditions so extremely difficult for the rise of a Non-European middle class as in South Africa. The law of the country prohibits Non-Europeans from owning or possessing minerals. Their right to own and occupy land is very much restricted and circumscribed and it is virtually impossible for them to own factories and mills. Therefore, they are vitally interested in the liberation of the Non-European people for it is only by destroying white supremacy and through the emancipation of the Non-Europeans that they can prosper and develop as a class. To each of these classes and groups the struggle for democratic rights offers definite advantages. To every one of them the realisation of the demands embodied in the Charter would open a new career and vast opportunities for development and prosperity. These are the social forces whose alliance and unity will enable the democratic movement to vanquish the forces of reaction and win the democratic changes envisaged in the Charter (Mandela 1956: 7–8).
Turok responds to Hirsch by insisting that, while the ANC held some contradictory positions on this issue, it is wrong to claim that the ANC wanted ‘free rein’ for a bourgeois struggle. We will return to this point in chapter 4.
MASS-BASED POLITICAL MOBILISATION, NON-RACIALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE FREEDOM CHARTER IN THE 1950S
This exclusionary Africanist position was to change with the 1952 Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws and the development of a non-racial political tradition under the newly emerging political leadership of Oliver Tambo and Mandela.
The mass politics of defiance in the 1950s increasingly brought into focus the dialectic of race and class – that is, the struggle to overcome national oppression was not reducible to a struggle against apartheid racism but had to confront the class relationships that reproduced inequality and underpinned racism. By implication, it had to confront the nature of the post-apartheid state and the post-apartheid society offered as an alternative to capitalism, as well as the repressive social exclusion associated with draconian apartheid legislation.
The ANC’s campaigning around rights of political citizenship became a primary focus of its political activities in the 1950s, with the specific concerns of social policy gradually subsumed under this primary political objective.
Andrew Mlangeni, last surviving member of the Robben Island group of Rivonia Trialists and a member of the CPSA and the ANC in the 1950s, was based in Dube, Soweto. His reflection on the ANC’s preoccupation with national liberation objectives to the virtual exclusion of deliberations on economic policy is telling:
You know in the 1950s, especially after the Defiance Campaign, the ANC was emphasising freedom, freedom for the people of South Africa, but in particular, the black people. There wasn’t so much talk about the economic position of the country, what the policy of the ANC was on the economy of the country. What was being emphasised was largely freedom, that we must be free to elect a government of our own like the white people at the time. So that we can live as the white people of South Africa lived at the time. In the branches of the African National Congress not much was being discussed about the economy of the country. Things only changed after the Freedom Charter was adopted (Mlangeni interview, 6 October 2015).
In 1952, Albert Luthuli became the president general, and he was to lead the ANC until his death in 1967. Luthuli commented in 1952 on the shift to militant opposition around citizenship demands as follows:
In so far as gaining citizenship rights and opportunities for the unfettered development of the African people, who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of my many years of moderation? Has there been any reciprocal tolerance or moderation from the Government, be it Nationalist or United Party? No! On the contrary, the past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all: no adequate land for our occupation, our only asset, cattle, dwindling, no security of homes, no decent and remunerative employment, more restriction to freedom of movement through passes, curfew regulations, influx control measures; in short we have witnessed in these years an intensification of our subjection to ensure and protect white supremacy.
It is with this background and with a full sense of responsibility that, under the auspices of the African National Congress (Natal), I have joined my people in the new spirit that moves them today, the spirit that revolts openly and boldly against injustice and expresses itself in a determined and non-violent manner (in Pillay 1993: 47).
What accounts for this displacement in the ANC from a concerted attempt to develop economic and social policies under Xuma in the 1940s, leading to the social democratic formulations of African Claims, to the relative policy barrenness of the 1950s, leading up to the Freedom Charter of 1955? A telling reason could be the combination of increased repression under the apartheid regime and weariness with constitutionally bound protests, with a more militant political leadership emerging in the ANC. Turok explained it as follows:
Now