In response to the column The Palestinian Struggle & Lessons from South Africa, Ken Knudsen wrote:
“I think that you are omitting a very large problem in South Africa, the white minority still owns and controls the gold and diamond mines and other wealth and the non white population is still suffering immensely. Until that problem is solved, I think that the South African revolution is incomplete and citing it as a solution for the oppressed Palestinians is a problem.”
Knudsen’s note raises a point that deserves discussion. But we disagree with his conclusions.
Tens of millions throughout the world rightly hailed the overthrow of the apartheid regime as a historic victory for the people of South Africa and all of humanity. We see no reason to revise that conclusion.
DISCUSSION WITH OUR READERS
It is true that victory has not led to the advance of a socialist revolution. South Africa is still a capitalist society. The Black population, which makes up the vast majority of the working class, is still exploited. Much of the ownership of the land remains in the hands of the white population. The promise of the Freedom Charter has not been fulfilled.
That is not because the strategy of the African National Congress (ANC) that led to the overthrow of apartheid — described in the previous article — was wrong or inadequate. Rather it is because the working class and oppressed in South Africa — as is widely true throughout the world today — have not yet been able to forge a leadership capable of taking the necessary next steps. The overthrow of apartheid and the overthrow of capitalism were never identical goals. That does not mean the overthrow of the brutal apartheid system was of no importance.
In the United States, capitalist exploitation and racist oppression remain a daily fact of life. Does that mean the massive working-class movement that overthrew Jim Crow segregation was also of no value? We don’t think so.
It is instructive to read again the warning issued by ANC leader Walter Sisulu:
“In certain circumstances, an emotional mass-appeal to destructive and exclusive nationalism can be a dynamic and irresistible force in history… It would be foolish to imagine that a wave of Black chauvinism provoked by the savagery of the Nationalist Party (and perhaps secretly encouraged and financed by it too) may not someday sweep through our country. And if it does, the agony will know no colour-bar at all.”
The ANC’s strategy of non-racialism and mass action was decisive in preventing such an outcome; one that would have set back the Black struggle for equality, and the working-class movement, for decades.
That is a lesson that truly deserves study. As we explained, in Palestine today that agony is all too real, as the death toll in Gaza mounts and conditions of life in the West Bank become increasingly harsh for Palestinians as a result of Israel’s brutal war and occupation. The strategy of Hamas has led to a result of the kind Sisulu warned of.
The most powerful working-class revolution the world has ever seen swept away tsarism in Russia in 1917. It began the socialist revolution in that country. However, that revolution was betrayed. As a result, the working class “suffered immensely,” to use the language of Knudsen’s comment. Does that mean the strategy of the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution was wrong and there are no lessons to be learned for those fighting today? We reject that idea as well.
—World-Outlook editors
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Categories: Palestine/Israel, World Politics
The very “incompleteness” of the struggle against apartheid is in and of itself, a cause for a more “complete” analysis of the current challenges of the class struggle in South Africa. Such a study would be of immense interest to revolutionary fighters around the world, including in Palestine. Despite the evident limits of the victory over apartheid, it is worthwhile to consider why South Africa was the first nation to challenge Israel’s genocide in Gaza before the International Court of Justice. That suit was launched from a powerful moral highground that reflects a historic victory whose impact obviously continues even within the limits of continuing bourgeois domination.
I have to take excption to your argumentative response to my letter where you say “Knudsen’s note raises a point that deserves discussion. But we disagree with his conclusions.” I only had one conclusion and that was ” I think that you are omitting a very large problem in South Africa, the white minority still owns and controls the gold and diamond mines and other wealth and the non white population is still suffering immensely. Until that problem is solved, I think that the South African revolution is incomplete and citing it as a solution for the oppressed Palestinians is a problem.” and everything else you sight is some body else’s conclusion.