“From the masses to the masses,” the Chinese communists used to say. This slogan mapped out the way revolutionary ideas could be developed. Change starts with mass action. The communist party then examines it for its strengths and weaknesses and relaunches it as a revolutionary strategy. We should apply this way of thinking on the 41st anniversary of the Soweto uprising.
On June 15th, 1976, no-one outside of the local area would have realized the revolutionary potential of the plan of students at Orlando West High School, Soweto (a black township outside of Johannesburg) to stage a peaceful demonstration demanding that lessons taught in English, not Afrikaans. (See letter below)
On June 16th, the cops met their peaceful protest with a hail of bullets. Among the first to be shot were a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old student. The local authorities had decided to intimidate them. Instead, they inflamed them. Over the next several months, the teenagers and even pre-teens ran at the police. They were arrested, tortured and sometimes killed in prison, but they kept marching and marching. They lost all fear. Nothing was left but the political commitment to smash racism.
The struggle spread beyond Soweto to involve every township in South Africa. Between 1980 and 1985, there was not one semester when a major boycott was not in progress. In 1984, over half a million students in over 60 townships boycotted school. By 1985, cops were arresting kids as young as seven years old! The courage of the students of Soweto inspired anti-racist action the world over.
When the youth walked out of schools, the State lost all control over them. Ideas like “Getting an education and getting ahead” or “Ensuring your future by passing exams” no longer appealed to them. The power of collective action gave them the chance to change the world. They deepened the critique of capitalist education by raising the slogan “Liberation before Education.”
From the start, the students turned to their parents, who were industrial, domestic and service workers. They organized stay-aways, rent strikes, boycotts, mass meetings and marches. The State answered with murder and mass repression. The youth turned the funerals of their fallen comrades into mass demonstrations.
The State then extended credits to members of the black middle class and recruited them into local township government which tried to raise rents, water and electric rates as well as build new police forces. The youth led the community response: they burned the local government buildings, executed the new cops and informers and threw the mayors out of office. In 1985, 240 black officials and 27 black mayors either resigned or fled to special centers for safety.
The power of the insurrection came from the class consciousness of the masses. In the townships, it over-ran the State sponsored counter-revolutionary black nationalism.
This insurrectionary class consciousness reached its height in 1984-85. Stay-aways were called to protest rent and transportation increases. Enforced by community groups, they called on workers to stay away from work by blocking access to essential mass transportation. In the Vaal triangle, they hit the industrial heartland. The State responded by sending in 7,000 troops to do house-to-house searches. This was a mistake. It showed the State no longer feared the militants; it now feared the whole working class!
In response, insurrectionary working-class consciousness now developed a powerful new slogan: “No More Heroes!”
The state and its capitalist backers were forced to promote the heroes of Robben Island: the ANC and Nelson Mandela. This, of course, has set back the advancement of the South African working class. It’s true that from Sharpeville to Marikana imperialist capitalism has ruled South Africa but defeatism has no place as we approach the 41st anniversary of the great Soweto uprising.
The vital link in the chain “From the masses to the masses” is a communist party. The old South African Communist Party (SACP)—and the old Communist movement that it was a part of—had abandoned the aim of communist revolution to smash capitalism. As the young comrades of Soweto proclaimed: “Long Live the Spirit of No Compromise,” the African National Congress and its ally, the SACP, were negotiating a compromise with capitalism which left racist exploitation intact. The SACP had never understood the need to eliminate money and the wage system. Nor did it understand that racism (as apartheid, Jim Crow or whatever form) is a product of capitalism and can’t be eliminated until capitalism is replaced by communism. Therefore, it was unable to advance the insights the masses had produced in their epic battle.
The collapse of the old makes room for the new. The International Communist Workers’ Party is growing among the masses in South Africa precisely because we have learned from the failures of the old Communist movement that we must fight directly for communism. We will never compromise with capitalism and the wage system, or with racism and xenophobia. As the articles and letters in this edition of Red Flag show, we are advancing the lessons of the youth of Soweto by building the ICWP and fighting for communism—not just in South Africa but around the world.
Comrade Writes: The Soweto Uprising from the Beginning
It is important that one approach what came to be known as the Soweto uprising from the beginning. Let me begin. The National Party [Afrikaner nationalists] came to power in 1948. It made new laws of racial segregation, apartheid laws. It replaced the British colonial education system, which our parents loosely referred to as the Royal Reader.
They swiftly introduced Bantu [segregated, racist] education. The last straw that broke the camel’s neck was the introduction of Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in all the schools. High school students in Soweto protested against this system. The waves of protests grew far and wide.
[Editor’s note: South Africa was colonized by the Dutch who were defeated by the British in 1902. Afrikaans is the language of these Dutch settlers who used it to build white South African nationalism. Black people saw it as the language of oppression.]
I was at secondary school at that stage and our bigger brothers and sisters were at the high schools fighting against this monster. Soon the authorities responded by clamping down on the protest by killing students as young as my age at the time. They raided the ring leaders. Some were put behind bars serving lengthy sentences. Others managed to escape the wrath of the authorities and went into exile.
These protests from high school students grew wider and wider and rejuvenated the then- defunct political and civil movements who were in a lull as the result of banning and imprisonment of activists.
This has affected most of us to never succumb to the system no matter how brutal it is, to fight against it even if it means one must die. Indeed, many paid the supreme price. It is their blood, their spirit, which nourishes us today to continue fighting and never give up no matter how formidable the enemy may look. We shall conquer it.
We also learned that enemy is capitalism and it must be smashed with worldwide communist revolution. This is when I met ICWP and decided to dedicate my efforts and energy to fight for communism.
—A Comrade in South Africa