The Anglo-Boer alliance

Mbeki the materialist, in the good old days 
 
 (A lovely bit of historical analogy, eh: "The historic compromise between
the British bourgeoisie and the Boer peasantry represented hence not a
historical aberration but the continued pursuit of maximum profit in
conditions of absolute freedom for capital to pursue its inherent
purposes.")

-----Original Message-----
From: socialchangezw 
Sent: Saturday, February 15, 2003 10:04 AM
Subject: [socialchangezw] Social Change online no.11

Our offering this week is the first article that appeared on our
`Focus on South Africa' page, which we started as our contribution to
the struggle against apartheid. This very first article, in 1982, was
written in 1978 by one of the up and coming young men of the ANC,
Thabo Mbeki:

The struggle against apartheid

The Anglo-Boer alliance

by Thabo Mbeki

The Landing of the employees of the Dutch East India Company at the
Cape of Good Hope in 1652 presented in embryo the emergence of class
society in South Africa. And that class society was bourgeois in its
infancy. The settlers of 1652 were brought to South Africa by the
dictates of the brutal period of the birth of a capitalist class
which has been characteristic of the stage of the primitive
accumulation of capital. Of this stage Marx wrote:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation,
enslavement and entombment in the mines of the aboriginal population,
the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the
turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black
skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalistic production.
These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive
accumulation. (Capital' vol.1, p. 751).The transformation of the
individualised and scattered means of production into socially
centred ones, of the pygmy property of the many into the huge
property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the
people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the
means of labour, this fearful and painful of the mass of the people
forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of
forcible methods . . . . . The expropriation of the immediate
producers was accomplished with merciless vandalism and under the
stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the
pettiest, the most meanly odious. (P.762).

It should therefore come as no surprise that six years after the
arrival of the Dutch settlers, in 1658, the first group of slaves
arrived in the Cape Colony. In 1806, when England seized the Cape
Colony from Holland by force of arms, there were 30,000 slaves in the
colony as against 26,000 settlers. There were also another 20,000
free Coloured, Nama and Khoi in white employ . . . Equally, it should
come as no surprise that these 20,000 African wage-earners had been
compelled into this position by the process, described by Marx and
other historians of the period, of the expropriation of the great
mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and
the means of labour . . . Described as free in relation to the 30,000
slaves in the colony, they were also free in so far as they had been
liberated by force of arms, disease and starvation from their status
as independent producers with their own hunting, grazing and arable
land, their livestock and their working implements.

The South African settlers of 1652 had themselves been the
expropriated of Europe. But, as in America, Canada, Australia and
elsewhere, after a little while, they were able to re-establish
themselves as independent producers, acquiring land in the manner we
have described on the basis of the expropriation of our people,
despite the most fierce resistance of the indigenous people. It was
exactly the blissful recovery of their status as masters of their own
house, their re-emergence as independent producers, that froze the
Boer community at a particular moment of historic time and thereby
guaranteed their regression. Thrown up by the birth of a higher
social system, they reverted precisely to that natural economy which
capitalism was so vengefully breaking up. But capital had already
taught them that in the pursuit of a better life everything,
including murder, was permissible and legitimate. A natural economy
presupposes the absence of accumulation, consisting, as the famous
historian R.H.Tawney argued of the petty dealings of peasants and
craftsmen in the small market town, where industry is carried on for
the subsistence of the household and the consumption of wealth
follows hard upon the production of it, and where commerce and
finance are occasional incidents, rather than the forces which keep
the whole system in motion. Thus it is the direct opposite of a
capitalist economy even when the latter is at its primitive stage of
accumulation. When they reverted to a patriarchal economy, the Boers
therefore abandoned all that was dynamic and revolutionary in the
formation of bourgeois society and transmuted the rest into something
stultified and reactionary and individualistic - drawn from the
isolation of the Boer family and homestead.

British capital subdued this petrified and arrogant individualism
during the Anglo-Boer War. In 1900 Boer and Briton entered into a
social contract in which the Briton undertook to help ease the Boer
out of the Dark Ages while promising to respect his traditions. For
his part, the Boer undertook not to resist the advance and domination
of British capital. Between them, Boer and Briton agreed that they
would share political power and, finally, that the indigenous African
population should not be party to this contract but would be kept
under the domination and at the disposal of the signatories, to be
used by them in whatever way they saw fit. There were therefore
written into this agreement, the so-called Act of Union of 1909, the
continuation of the methods and practices of exploitation
characteristic of primitive accumulation of capital which had
remained fossilised in the Boer economy but which British capital had
outgrown, certainly in Britain.

In the end it was the British armies which defeated the African
people, the British who drove us off our lands, broke up the natural
economy and social systems of the indigenous peoples. It was they who
imposed taxes on the African peasants and, starting with the Masters
and servants Act of 1856, laid down the labour laws which govern the
black worker in South Africa today (1978). In Europe the economic
freedom of the worker to hire himself out freely to the highest
bidder, which came with and was part of the bourgeois revolution was
of course connected with, accompanied and enhanced by the political
freedom of the worker to represent himself in matters of state
through the vote, itself an integral part of the victory of the
bourgeoisie over feudal society. In South Africa this was not to be.
Here the capitalist inherited the rights of the feudal lord and
appropriated to himself the right to determine where, when, at what
price and under what conditions the African shall sell his labour
power to the capitalist. He also appropriated to himself the right to
decide what is good for the native.

The historic compromise between the British bourgeoisie and the Boer
peasantry represented hence not a historical aberration but the
continued pursuit of maximum profit in conditions of absolute freedom
for capital to pursue its inherent purposes.

Of the bourgeois countries, South Africa is unique in the extent that
profit maximisation is the overt, hidden and principal objective of
state policy, and can therefore be regarded with respect to this
characteristic as an almost perfect model of capitalism, cleansed of
everything that is superfluous to its essential characterisation, a
model which displays to all, in their true nakedness the inter-motive
forces of this social system and its fundamental interconnections.
The position that the black people occupy in this model can be
defined as follows:
1. they are the producers of the wealth;
2. they produce this wealth not for their own benefit but for
its appropriation by the white population; and
3. they are permitted to consume part of this wealth but only in
the proportion that will give the maximum amount of work on a
continuing basis.
The irony of the South African situation is that precisely because
capital permits Africans to enter the city, to pass through the
sacred portals of the white church, and set foot in the even more
sacred sanctuary of madam's bedroom, but only as workers, capital
thereby indicates to us daily that is in fact our labour that enables
the city to live, that gives voice to the predikant (preacher) and
provides the necessary conditions for procreation. Since then we (the
African workers) are, in a very real sense, the creators of society,
what remains for us is to insist and ensure that society is made in
our image and that we have dominion over it. Inasmuch as the producer
and the parasite that feeds on that represent antithetical forces,
the one working and the other idle; the one wanting to escape the
obligation of the nursemaid and the other striving to ensure that he
is forever fed, inasmuch there must be a South Africa over which the
African people have dominion be the antithesis of present-day South
Africa,

That free South Africa must therefore redefine the black producer, or
rather since we the people shall govern, since we shall by our own
struggle have placed ourselves in the position of makers of history
and policy and no longer be the mere objects of that history, we
shall redefine our own position as follows:
1. we are the producers of wealth;
2. we produce this wealth for our own benefit to be appropriated
by us as producers;
3. the aim of this production shall be the satisfaction, at an
increasing level, of the material and spiritual needs of the people;
4. we shall so order the rest of society and social activity, in
education and culture, in the legal sphere, on military questions, in
our international relations, etc., to conform to these goals.

It is a demonstration in practice of how the bourgeoisie, by refusing
to temper its greed, did ultimately teach the people to identify
their true interests without any equivocation. In my view, the
Freedom Charter (the political programme of the ANC adopted in 1955)
provides us with the programme within which such a redefinition can
occur. It should be of some interest to point out that this programme
was written exclusively on the basis of demands submitted by
thousands and thousands of ordinary workers, peasants, businessmen ,
intellectuals and other professional people, the youth and women of
all nationalities of South Africa. It is a measure of their maturity
that these masses should have so clearly understood the fundamental
direction of their aspirations.

It is important to note that the people of South Africa have long
discovered that the end of the injustices, exclusiveness and
arrogance created by white supremacy would not be brought about by
black supremacy.

Consider the circumstances in which we might position black
capitalism s the antithesis to white capitalism. Fortunately, Fanon
has already warned us that one of the results of imperialist
domination is that in the colonial middle class `the dynamic, pioneer
aspect', the characteristics of the inventor and discoverer of new
worlds which are found in all national bourgeoisies are lamentably
absent. In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial
countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of
the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact
beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to the
petulance, the fearlessness or the will to succeed of youth. Thus
black capitalism, instead of being the antithesis, is rather
confirmation of parasitism with no redeeming features whatsoever,
without any extenuating circumstances to justify its existence. If
you want to see a living example, go to the Transkei.

The Freedom Charter itself says that `the national wealth of our
country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the
people.'. It also goes on to say `all the land (shall be redivided
among those who work it to banish famine and land hunger'. We believe
sincerely that it is only in conditions of such an equality as is
underpinned by these provisions that we shall each acquire the right
to be human, and thereby create the conditions for the creative
realisation of the considerable talent of our people, both black and
white, which today is firmly stifled by the suffocating purposes of a
small exploiting and oppressive minority. To transcend that status of
mere producer to that of human being capital has taught us by
negative example that we must guarantee ourselves the right to work
and to social security, good housing and health services, education,
culture, pride and joy in the multiplicity of languages and
progressive national traditions among ourselves and among the peoples
of Africa and the world. We must therefore preface our own system of
accounting with the provision that our rational calculations must
serve to enlarge human life and not to negate it.

We have therefore to strive to banish war and the threat of force in
the settlement of international disputes. We must work to abolish the
use of fear against individuals and communities as an instrument of
policy, and therefore uphold and fight for the right of peoples to
true self-determination, for friendship and mutually advantageous co-
operation among the peoples of the world. We are convinced that in
this way we would restore our country to its rightful position as a
steadfast friend and ally of all who struggle for peace, democracy
and social progress, and not the repugnant predator she is today.

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We would still like to reach the wide public we had for the original
magazine, which includes a lot of people who do not have e-mail. If
you know anyone without e-mail who would be interested, we encourage
you to print out the articles for them.

The editors