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Discordant Comrades
Allison Drew, Discordant Comrades — Identities and Loyalties on the South African Left, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000, ISBN 0 7546 0195 1, pp309.
Allison Drew offers a detailed and absorbingly vivid account of the development of 'the left' in South Africa over the first half of the last century. Recognising 'structural parameters', Drew insists that there were choices and decisions, not a simple preordained linear process constituting that history — 'that events did not have to unfold as they did.' In her conclusion, she gives particular weight to two major examples of 'opportunities which may have been lost'.
In September 1931, several members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) were expelled. Amongst them was Sidney Bunting who had been central to attempts to orientate the party to black workers. Drew raises the real political option of those members forming a 'new socialist body'. In 1928 Bunting had founded the League of African Rights (LAR) with a programme of 'both democratic and national liberation components'. This was an 'organisation of ordinary people — as opposed to the then tiny ANC [African National Congress], which was dominated by chiefs and other political and economic elites'. In October 1929, the Comintern ordered its disbanding 'just as [it] … was gaining ground'. Drew appropriately raises the question of what might have developed without the dissolution.
Beyond her primary focus on the left, Drew's work emphasises that the history of the ANC is embedded in the struggle of different classes and development amongst different alternative organisations, none of which had a preordained mass base. If for those reasons alone, her history is to be welcomed at a time when the history of struggle in South Africa is sometimes rewritten as the history of the convergence of the anti-apartheid pragmatism of capital and the anti-apartheid struggle of the masses, both expressed in the ineluctable rise of the ANC in order to take the nation forward in the struggle for international competitiveness.
Her tendency is to move from developments inside the left to the broader movement of resistance, to the working class. This means that for the reader unfamiliar with the history of struggle in South Africa, organisations and events are sometimes encountered in a jarring way, before they are later outlined with greater detail and information. More importantly, it expresses a key aspect of Drew's approach — the tendency to focus her explanations of intra-left developments on intra-left developments (whether local or international), rather than issues about relating outwards to the workers' struggle.
Welcoming Drew's insistence that the historical process involves options, I have to say that I find her application of that insistence less convincing. She is right in insisting that the examples highlighted earlier, amongst other possibilities, posed real historical options; that what happened was explicable, but not preordained. But a recognition of that needs to go further. Bunting chose both to obey the Comintern directives and not to form (or join) a new socialist 'organisation'. What is at issue here are questions of theoretical perspective, political vision and principles in terms of which real historical alternatives were identified and chosen (or not chosen). Central then is political judgement and the bases on which this is made. The fact that Drew (as I) clearly would have preferred different judgements does not define Bunting's out of existence as judgements themselves. True, as Drew insists, there were impositions of a destructive 'line' and policy zigzags. These were characteristics of the Stalinisation (rendered by Drew as Bolshevisation) of both the Comintern and the CPSA. Real political alternatives were concretised in the situation around a whole set of inescapable questions: What would the policy of the LAR have been? What form of organisation would Bunting have formed? What policies would it have pursued in relation to the different and sometimes conflicting class interests amongst blacks? What policy would it have adopted in relation to the 1935 popular fronts? Would it have pursued a working class united front instead? In opposition? How would it have dealt with the relations between black and white workers? Would it have, like the CPSA, tried to end a wave of strikes in 1943 in support of the war effort? How would it have related to the Stalin/Hitler Pact? The international Left Opposition? Would it have supported the All African Convention (AAC)? The ANC? Neither? This set of issues emerges, not as simple speculation, but because they were posed in the situation. As such, these — and others — were precisely the issues on which 'the left' was making political choices — different political judgements. The existence of alternatives was being reflected in the political discord which she seems to bemoan as unnecessary and imposed.
Drew makes a welcome contribution to that too limited historiography which does not reduce 'the left' to the CPSA and does not reduce the politics of the CPSA to its official positions. Her work takes us into tensions and differing political tendencies inside the CPSA and to left politics, primarily trotskyist, outside and in opposition to the CPSA. She gives appropriate weight and detailed attention to a range of organisations of struggle including the National Liberation League, the Non-European United Front, and the AAC. Her work is filled with information constituting a vivid picture of many aspects of the organisations and individuals self-identifying as socialist. But what constitutes identity as socialist or left? Drew provides detailed information on the left in relation to issues of theory, programme, practice and relations to the working class, but seems to regard self-identity as largely sufficient (although she draws her own implicit lines, excluding some of the racists of the SA Labour Party). Despite the empirical detail which she brings in relation to the struggle of workers and the relationships of socialists to that struggle, there is a tendency to focus primarily on socialist identity as being constituted in the ways in which self-identified socialists relate to each other. The problem for Drew, highlighted in her title, is discord amongst 'comrades'. By implication, the solution is accord and people who self-identify as socialists could have been loyal to each other, rather than what she sometimes trivialises as doctrine. In the answer of unity, however, is the set of questions to which different chosen answers historically led to real disunity. Sidestepping issues of 'doctrine', however apparently attractive, merely means reposing them at another point. With whom would there have been accord? On what basis? To do what? In struggle for what and against what? We are returned to the same types of political questions around which there were different political choices being made.
As evidenced in the examples above, Drew points to ways in which Comintern orders from 1929 onwards interfered with the development of a more 'advanced tendency' inside the CPSA (linked to Bunting). She has earlier provided us with material allowing us to see how the Bolshevik revolution and the politics of internationalism promoted precisely that development in an earlier period. South Africans in struggle have shared the support of probably the most extensive solidarity movement in human history. At a time when 'international' appears meaningful only as the prefix for competitiveness, there is a particularly acute need to search history past and present for those examples of a different, enriching proletarian alternative of crossing capitalism's national boundaries. There is a well-trodden path along which the hope of marxist and proletarian internationalism is analytically reduced to the foreign policy dictates of the Soviet bureaucracy. If the description seems to mirror the actual degeneration of the Comintern, it is regrettable that Drew does not allow for the real historical alternatives posed in the situation, tending to portray that degeneration as itself ineluctable and preordained — the problem of marxist internationalism per se.
Drew provides us with a valuable resource in coming closer to the history she studies. Despite my reservations about aspects of the underlying approach, I believe her work should be welcomed and used as a richly documented, detailed and comprehensive contribution to the exploration of the history of the left in South Africa. Notwithstanding its particularities, the struggle in South Africa throws up issues faced by the left, workers and oppressed people internationally. For that reason, and because the struggle in South Africa belongs to workers and progressive people throughout the world, her work is also a valuable resource for those whose primary focus of interest may not simply be the (too) small left in South Africa in the first half of the last century.
