[From its foundation in the 1920s, the South African Communist
Party took up the fight against racism as a central part of its
political vision. The party’s heroic record in the anti-apartheid
movement has now received the historical treatment it deserves.]
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SOUTH AFRICA’S COMMUNISTS WERE CRUCIAL TO THE FIGHT AGAINST
APARTHEID  
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Owen Dowling
February 12, 2023
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ From its foundation in the 1920s, the South African Communist Party
took up the fight against racism as a central part of its political
vision. The party’s heroic record in the anti-apartheid movement has
now received the historical treatment it deserves. _

South African Communist Party supporters marching in favor of a "Yes"
for a referendum on ending apartheid on March 18, 1992 in
Johannesburg, South Africa., AFP via Getty Images

 

Review of Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African
Communist Party 1921–2021 by Tom Lodge (Johannesburg: Jacana Media,
2021)

Moses Kotane was the longest-serving leader of the South African
Communist Party (SACP) and an iconic figure in South African politics
who helped forge the party’s long-standing alliance with the African
National Congress (ANC). In 1938, he explained what had drawn him
toward communism: “I am first an African and then a Communist. I
came to the Communist Party because I saw in it the way out and the
salvation for the African people.”

The contested relationship between class, African nationhood, and the
character of revolutionary politics in South Africa has been a
defining theme throughout the SACP’s century-long history. Tom
Lodge’s _Red Road to Freedom
[[link removed]]_, the first
complete account of the SACP from its origins to the present, explores
these themes in depth, expertly reconstructing the multigenerational
political, social, and intellectual lives of South Africa’s
Communists.

Writing Communist History

Lodge is a veteran historian of the South African left, and his book
is the product of almost forty years of research. While composing his
landmark study, _Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945
[[link removed]] _(1983),
Lodge recalls that he had realized the importance of Communists in the
history of “the great set pieces of anti-apartheid struggle of the
1950s.” In spite of this, they were virtually absent from the
existing scholarship.

The South African Communist Party kept a tight lid on its internal
life during the long war against apartheid.

Resolving to write a history of the SACP, Lodge did not set himself an
easy task. The “Secret Party” kept a tight lid on its internal
life during the long war against apartheid, which had to be conducted
under the weight of immense repression inside the country until the
1960s, and after that point from exile throughout Europe and Africa.

However, the tottering of the apartheid regime from the late 1980s,
which led to the unbanning of the SACP alongside the ANC in 1990,
expedited Lodge’s work. Memoirs and interviews from the party’s
typically tight-lipped cadres could now be more forthcoming.

Unlike previous studies that have focused on particular periods or
dimensions of SACP life, Lodge’s panorama encompasses over a century
of political and organizational history. Biographies of leading
cadres, strategic and theoretical debates, national and local
Communist networks, and more are covered across its nine chapters.

Standing at almost five hundred pages with another 120 pages of
endnotes, Lodge’s study is distinct among other notable histories of
national Communist parties. Lucio Magri chiefly framed
his retrospective on the Italian Communist Party
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the period between Palmiro Togliatti’s “Salerno Turn” and the
1990s, while the _Lost World of British Communism_
[[link removed]] that
Raphael Samuel reconstructed was specifically that of the 1940s. _Red
Road to Freedom_, on the other hand, attempts a full, detailed account
of its subject’s entire chronology, and arguably succeeds. This is a
massive accomplishment.

Throughout this comprehensive progression through the party’s
history, several key red threads appear. One of the most prominent is
the party’s protracted transformation from a modest and almost
exclusively white vanguardist formation into a genuinely sizable and
predominantly black mass party.

Origins

The SACP is probably best known today for its activities during
apartheid’s terminal years. Under the leadership of Joe Slovo and
Chris Hani, the party began to acquire rank-and-file support inside
South Africa once again, and its regalia appeared at anti-apartheid
demonstrations.

This was a moment captured in a well-known photo
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taken at a 1990 rally, of Nelson Mandela (once briefly a party member)
standing alongside Slovo and Winnie Mandela before a massive
hammer-and-sickle banner. _Red Road to Freedom_ opens its narrative
eight decades before this climactic tableau with the prehistory of the
small, white party that was to be founded in 1921.

The outsized contribution of Jewish South Africans to the fight
against white minority-rule is clear throughout the book.

Lodge begins with the various diasporic currents which fed into a
small socialist culture within the settler colony, including
anglophone white laborism
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syndicalism, and Bundism
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the Jewish socialist tendency with origins in the tsarist empire.
Lodge attributes an especially important role to Eastern European
Jewish migrants in “the evolution of South Africa’s revolutionary
socialism.”

On this account, the inclination of Bundists to “oppose racial
discrimination in general” following their own experience with
tsarist antisemitism was a key agent in “reinforcing
predispositions” on the radical left of South Africa’s then
exclusively white labor movement to “extend organization beyond
white workers.” The outsized contribution of Jewish South Africans
to the fight against white minority-rule is clear throughout the book:
one need only think of Ray Alexander, Denis Goldberg
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or Ruth First.

Before outlining the Communist Party’s early years, Lodge explores
its chief predecessor, the International Socialist League (ISL). This
was an anti-militarist grouping that had split from the South African
Labour Party in 1915, associating itself with the Zimmerwald left in
Europe.

The ISL counted among its leaders W. H. Andrews — known as “the
[Karl] Liebknecht of South Africa” — and prominent advocates of
organizing with African workers, like Sidney Bunting and David Ivon
Jones. It celebrated the Russian Revolution, which bolstered the
significance for these white socialists of what they referred to as
“the solidarity of labour irrespective of race or colour.”

The ISL’s first African members, such as T. W. Thibedi and Hamilton
Kraai, came into its orbit in part through its involvement in founding
the Industrial Workers of Africa, South Africa’s first black trade
union. Lodge argues that these early recruits played a decisive part
in the adaptation of the “foreign lexicon” of Marxism to South
African conditions, and ultimately in “indigenising a South African
socialist lineage.”

In 1921, the ISL, in conjunction with other small socialist entities
like the Durban-based Marxian Club, agreed to the twenty-one
conditions laid down for affiliation to the Communist International
and founded the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA). The party
would operate under this name for the next three decades, before its
1950 banning and clandestine reformation three years later saw it
rechristened as the SACP.

Crossing the Color Line

Lodge illustrates the serious challenges that faced the young
Communist Party when its ostensible commitment to mass, interracial
proletarian unity came up against South Africa’s segregationist
social order. These challenges were dramatically exemplified in the
1922 Rand Revolt, the white mine workers’ strike-turned-insurrection
that is depicted on the book’s cover.

The Communist Party’s commitment to mass, interracial proletarian
unity came up against South Africa’s segregationist social order.

The white strikers occupied a relatively privileged position within a
racially hierarchized labor market, and they dreaded being supplanted
by lower-paid African labor. They articulated their opposition to real
capitalist threats to their livelihoods in the language of anti-black
racism, exemplified by the jarring banner they unfurled with the
message “Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South
Africa.”

As Lodge explains, the still overwhelmingly white Communists generally
gave the Rand Revolt their (critical) support, with many party members
rationalizing the white-identitarian fervor as a form of “transient
consciousness” on the path to a more revolutionary perspective based
on interracial solidarity. This was an optimistic outlook that the
alarming, subsequent outbreak of pogromist violence would disabuse.

The book’s treatment of the 1920s looks in particular at the
party’s more concerted efforts under Sidney Bunting’s chairmanship
to recruit black cadres. It redirected its efforts from “winning
over white workers” toward African struggles and rights — leading
one official to quit the party with the complaint that Africans
“could not possibly appreciate the noble ideals of communism.”

Lodge extensively details the initiatives through which the CPSA
strove to attract black workers. These included engagement with
African trade unions and nationalist organizations, help establishing
new unions, and the production of isiXhosa-language publications.
There were also community initiatives like the night schools teaching
literacy and Marxist theory with Nikolai Bukharin and Yevgeni
Preobrazhensky’s _ABC of Communism
[[link removed]]_.

African cadre Joseph Phalane had the following message for a 1926
meeting of black trade unionists:

I am a Communist not because there are white people in the Communist
Party, but because that is the Party that will make us free. We want a
black Communist Party.

Moses Kotane was another African recruit from this period and went on
to serve as the party’s general secretary from 1939 until his death
in 1978. The process of _Africanisation_, to borrow a phrase that
Kotane favored, was in Lodge’s words a “transformative
experience” for the SACP’s place in twentieth-century history.

Communism and National Liberation

The best account of the CPSA’s day-to-day immersion within black
communal life comes in the chapter on the 1940s. Lodge impressively
reconstructs the local lives and networks of the party across
different African townships by exploring its wartime and postwar
involvement within the “bread and butter” struggles of the
expanding black peri-urban proletariat. He depicts an aspirant mass
black party “of varying effectiveness and social character.”

The relationship of South African Communists to African nationalist
politics is another consistent theme across Tom Lodge’s account.

By 1950, Lodge argues, Kotane’s party had come a long way from its
white-laborist origins. Voices that had been “advocating a primarily
cross-racial class struggle–based approach” to revolutionary
politics — separated from African nationalist currents — had now
become a minority.

The relationship of South African Communists to African nationalist
politics is another consistent theme across Lodge’s account.
Bunting’s attitude toward the early ANC was derisive: he saw it as
“an admirable buffer enabling the ruling class to stave off the real
emancipation of the natives.” As the Congress adopted a more
combative stance toward white supremacy, Kotane’s SACP formed a
long-term alliance with the ANC in the struggle against apartheid that
has endured since liberation.

Lodge has to evaluate conflicting claims about the extent of the
SACP’s influence within the Congress Alliance during the 1950s, the
so-called Decade of Defiance. He concludes that Communists, who were
“already well established in the ANC’s top echelon,”
substantially “succeeded in shaping the ANC’s programmatic
orientation” from the mid-1950s. According to Lodge, SACP theorists
— notably Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein — played a “central
role” in the formulation of the 1955 Freedom Charter, with its
references to “people’s democracy” and an economic clause that
favored nationalization of industry.

Responding to the State of Emergency that followed the 1960
Sharpeville Massacre, Lodge writes, “communist and national
liberation leaders” jointly formed “a new armed formation” after
a proposal by the Marxist-Leninist intellectual Michael Harmel,
“evocatively entitled ‘What Is To Be Done?’.” Over the next
thirty years, the military operations of this new group, uMkhonto we
Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), would symbolize the formal
practical-programmatic unity between the Communist Party and the
mainstream African national liberation movement.

Theoretical Debates

Along with this practical convergence between SACP and ANC
politics, _Red Road to Freedom_ depicts a succession of
intra-Marxist debates over the relationships between class and race,
capitalism and colonialism, and proletarian revolution and national
liberation. In the course of these discussions, the party worked out a
“theoretical justification” for its alignment with ostensibly
bourgeois African nationalism.

Lodge devotes a lot of space to the controversy over the “Native
Republic” concept. This was a 1927–28 Comintern thesis of
contested origins which stipulated that the CPSA should advance “as
its immediate political slogan an independent black South African
Republic as a stage toward a Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic.”
It divided the party, with Marxist cadres, black and white, either
defending or denouncing “the notion of a staged progress toward
socialism” in South Africa, which implied that proletarian
revolution should be delayed to some future point while Communists
dedicated their present efforts to the achievement of a (noncommunist)
Native Republic.

Similarly, the SACP’s later alliance with the ANC received a
“doctrinal justification” in the classification of apartheid South
Africa as a “colony of a special type,” where the party should
pursue “intermediate ‘national democratic’ aims.” This would
mean working to overthrow white minority rule as part of a preliminary
stage before “the full development of a socialist society.”

Lodge’s discussion of these revisions to orthodox Marxist thinking
on nationalist politics — which would continue to dominate the
party’s thinking throughout its period in exile — is one of the
book’s strongest elements. He weaves together a clear and coherent
account of the SACP’s intellectual trajectory from an often
(conceptually and archivally) byzantine historical record.

International Relations

One of the book’s most memorable sections explores the SACP’s
global reach after police repression had forced those of its cadres
who had not yet been imprisoned to flee the country. Lodge follows the
odyssey of party leaders and operatives all over the world, from
Britain and the Eastern Bloc to supportive African states like
Tanzania, Mozambique, Angola, and Zambia. A particular highlight is
the coverage of Ronnie Kasrils
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London, where he worked with the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the broad
left while recruiting young people to carry out dangerous missions
inside South Africa itself.

Lodge follows the odyssey of SACP leaders and operatives all over the
world, from Britain and the Eastern Bloc to supportive African states.

_Red Road to Freedom_ is a true international history, and not only
in its treatment of the party’s quarter-century of exile. While the
SACP certainly had its own idiosyncratic features, some of the key
moments in global communist history left their imprint on the party.
Those moments ranged from the Third Period and Popular Front phases of
the Comintern’s development to Stalin’s Terror, wartime
anti-fascism, the establishment of communist states in Eastern Europe
(where a number of SACP cadres had roots), the Sino-Soviet split, and
the ultimate demise of the Soviet-led bloc in 1989–91.

The SACP’s relationship with the Soviet Union and other communist
states such as Czechoslovakia and East Germany features heavily
throughout. In some respects, this connection appears to have been
beneficial. As Lodge points out, the ANC’s military wing uMkhonto
received “considerable” financial aid and “generous” military
support from Eastern Bloc countries, whose “exceptional”
amiability toward the ANC owed much to its links with the SACP.

On the other hand, Lodge doesn’t shy away from some of the SACP’s
most retrospectively unflattering moments in this context. The 1930s
were the apogee of the CPSA’s subordination to Comintern policy.
This was a time in which an intolerant leadership purged Bunting and
others for insufficient fealty to Moscow’s capricious dictates. One
member of that leadership, Latvian-born Lazar Bach, later fell victim
himself to the runaway train of Stalinist paranoia, dying in a gulag.

Lodge describes the deleterious effects of “a political culture
nurtured by Comintern injunctions in which disagreement was perceived
as treachery.” An enduring habituation to this style of
authoritarianism was visible later in the century, when SACP cadres
offered general (though not unanimous) justification for Soviet
interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

_Red Road to Freedom_ captures well the ambiguities and
contradictions in the twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist relationship
to the politics of democracy and liberation internationally. However,
Lodge justifiably places the overall emphasis on what he calls the
“central” (and often genuinely heroic) part played by Communists
in the overcoming of racist oppression in South Africa, and in the
“evolution of organised political activities that have sought to
engage all South Africans as citizens.”

After Apartheid

Lodge brings the themes of his book together in its final chapter,
looking at the place of the SACP in South Africa’s postapartheid
political landscape. Unlike many classical Communist parties, the SACP
survived the short twentieth century and today constitutes South
Africa’s second-largest party by membership. Communists, Lodge
asserts, “still belong to South Africa’s political mainstream.”

The party has maintained a close, though progressively more
complicated, relationship with the ANC ‘party-state.’

The party has maintained a close, though progressively more
complicated, relationship with the ANC “party-state.” Every ANC
government since 1994 has included some of its leading cadres in
ministerial roles, while as Lodge notes, all of South Africa’s
postapartheid presidents — with the exception of the current leader
Cyril Ramaphosa — “at one time or another belonged to the
party.”

However, the ANC’s move away from the socialist economic vision of
the Freedom Charter toward neoliberalism while in office has
unquestionably strained the historical alliance. Communist ministers
and local officials have been far from blameless in the ANC’s
economic liberalization policies (not to mention political
“rent-seeking” controversies). Yet the SACP has nevertheless begun
to articulate a critique of the ANC’s economic model, which it
understands as being partially the result of the proximity of ANC
leaders to South Africa’s new “black bourgeoisie.”

The process of developing this critique, as Lodge details, has been
protracted and contested. Party leaders stood by the government in
many instances — including, shamefully, over the 2012 Marikana
massacre of striking miners. Prominent cadres have been disciplined
for their outspoken criticism of the ANC alliance, with Mazibuko Jara
and Vishwas Satgar expelled for questioning the SACP’s support for
Jacob Zuma, while others such as Ronnie Kasrils have “disengaged”
from the party.

At the same time, Lodge explains, the SACP’s most recent program has
brought into question the time-honored stagist thinking behind its
attachment to the ANC. It now asserts that the task of “achieving
national democracy” will “require an increasingly decisive advance
toward socialism.”

Lodge breaks off his study with the challenge facing the present-day
SACP, as he sees it: how to “reassert an independent identity” as
a specifically socialist formation without breaking entirely from its
seven-decade association with the “wider nationalist movement,”
which it still believes to occupy “the main sites of struggle” and
“chief centres of power” for the pursuit of its “Red Road.”

Red Road to Freedom

Tom Lodge’s sweeping portrait of the SACP is properly definitive.
Dealing with all facets of the party’s life across each phase of its
evolution, and marshaling an expert’s command of the archive, _Red
Road to Freedom_ offers readers a hitherto unavailable perspective on
SACP history in its totality. For its authoritative and fair-minded
meditation on the fiercest inner-party controversies, and expert
reconstruction of once-secret and still disputed chapters of
history, _Red Road to Freedom_ is unsurpassed.

_Red Road to Freedom_ can be confident of its deserved standing among
the best histories of revolutionary socialist organizations.

No study this ambitious can be perfect. By opting for an evaluative
rather than a strictly chronological approach, Lodge can sometimes
pass too quickly over the narrative details of significant events to
which he refers. Indeed, the book may be challenging for readers not
already familiar with the course of twentieth-century South African
political history. However, these limitations are probably inherent to
the thematic, rather than narrative, style of history-writing that
allows the book’s assessment of its main object to be so
comprehensive.

_Red Road to Freedom_, although a new book, can be confident of its
deserved standing among the best histories of revolutionary socialist
organizations. Our understanding of the twentieth-century Communist
experience would be immeasurably improved if more national Communist
parties were to receive a biography of the caliber Tom Lodge has given
the SACP. He has set a new standard for writing Communist history.

_OWEN DOWLING is a historian and archival researcher at Tribune.
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_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
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* apartheid
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* History
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* Racism
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