Class conflict abated during the war. Full employment, a rise in profits, and patriotic sentiment generated goodwill on both sides. Government and employers discovered that trade unions could contribute much to industrial peace and efficiency. The union leaders responded with a policy of avoiding action that might reduce output. Trade unionism recovered from the setback suffered after the abortive general strike of 1914 and the resulting large-scale victimizations. The Transvaal Federation of Trades, in a bid to repair the damage and overcome weaknesses disclosed by the strike, changed its name to the South African Industrial Federation and invited the affiliation of unions throughout the country. Only the Cape Federation of Trade Unions held aloof. Established in 1913, it proclaimed a willingness to organize and admit all workers without regard to race, colour or creed. Some of its affiliated unions, notably in the printing, furniture, baking and building trades, consisted mainly of Coloured members. Bob Stuart, the Cape Federation's secretary and a stubborn Scot, refused to play second fiddle to the north and rejected its white labour policy. The SAIF was the major trade union centre and developed into a powerful organization under the leadership of another Scot, the former radical Archie Crawford.
Deported in 1914, Crawford returned a changed man. His metamorphosis from an extreme radical to a right-wing bureaucrat paralleled that of Bill Andrews in the opposite direction. They interchanged their roles. Andrews, now an uncompromising revolutionary, would accuse Crawford, in more elegant language, of the crimes against the working class of which Crawford had accused Andrews in the earlier period. It has been suggested that Crawford when in exile was persuaded by British trade unionists to adopt a policy of class collaboration.1 He was not one to be influenced easily against his basic inclinations. It is more likely that he found an outlet for his ambition in an important office of the kind to which he had aspired without success in the days of his youthful militancy. Not satisfied with building the SAIF into a big organization, he wanted the entire trade union movement to turn around him. The war gave him an opportunity to obtain by means of diplomacy and conciliation the kind of power that he had failed to achieve through bluster and appeals for mass action.
His favoured technique was to form reference boards which enabled him to negotiate on behalf of the unions affiliated to the SAIF. He and Gemmill, the secretary of the Chamber of Mines, settled nearly all white labour disputes on the mines in this way during the war years.2 The owners showed their goodwill by collecting trade union dues under a stop order system; while the unions reciprocated in September 1916 by agreeing to freeze wage rates for the duration of the war and three months thereafter. This, said Andrews and his associates in the ISL, amounted to a vicious collaboration that stemmed from the basic error of support for the war. The unions were seeking favours from their masters, who 'packed them off as cannon fodder, this probably being the final destination of Trade Unionism by Craft and Crawfordism '.3
African miners received neither favours from the owners nor aid from the white workers. When whites employed at Van Ryn Deep mine came to work on 21 December 1915, they were told to return home as the entire morning shift of 2,800 Africans had struck work in protest against an unsympathetic compound manager and to redress the grievances of drilers. The latter were kept so long at 'lashing' (removing rock dislodged from the face by the previous blast) that they could not drill the minimum norm of thirty-six inches and so were given 'loafer' tickets. Unable to obtain satisfaction, a party of strikers set off along the Main Reef Road to interview officials of the Native Recruiting Corporation in Johannesburg. A posse of mounted police intercepted them and forced them back to the compound. The strike ended when the management agreed under pressure of government officials, to assure the men that 'their legitimate grievances would be redressed'. 4 International socialists did not fail to draw the contrast between African militancy and the passivity of white workers.
Jones and Bunting, the League's leading theorists, gave two broad reasons. The Labour party, they said, had erred by making votes its main target, only to find that it could not match the jingoism of the Unionists in a khaki election.5 More basically the workers had been corrupted by racialism. slaves to a higher oligarchy, the white workers of South Africa themselves in turn batten on a lower slave class.' They compensated for their inferior class status by lording it over Africans. More intolerant than any other working class, the whites were also more parasitical. Appeals to international unity could never evoke a sincere response from a rank-and-file so situated.6 The war was being waged in the name of freedom, and to get it they had to give it. The fact had to be faced that the freedom for which they fought was a mere name to an overwhelming army of native wage labourers who were spat on and spurned by the great majority of their white fellow workers.7
Vote-catching had ruined the movement, agreed Jimmy Bain, who had preceded Crawford as secretary of the SAIF. The comment appeared in an obituary on Tom Mathews, a victim of the miners' 'white scourge' in March 1915. His last words were: 'I have served the Labour movement faithfully these twenty-one years. I hope it is satisfied.' Few men had done more for the workers than Mathews, wrote Bain, and few had received less. Born at Newlyn, Cornwall, in 1867, he migrated to the United States at the age of fifteen, rose to be president of the miners' union in Montana, and was elected in 1892 to the state house of representatives as Labour's only member. He came to the Rand in 1897, took a prominent part in the miners' union, and became its general secretary in 1907. strong as a lion' and 'fearless of speech', he was more of a socialist than a Labour party man, according to Bain. He helped to found the movement 'before votes were counted of so much importance; before there were places and preferment, Provincial Councils and all other soul-stifling influences of today, at work'.8 Mathews was succeeded by another militant, the Australian-born J. Forrester Brown, a founding member of the ISL and an advocate of inter-racial working-class solidarity. He too succumbed like Mathews to what Bain described as ' the narrow-mindedness of his own class'.
Brown, Andrews and other prominent trade unionists in the ISL were unable to detach themselves wholly from the white power structure; and had no intention of following the socialists of Durban and Cape Town into the isolation of a debating society. The League made a bid for leadership by taking part in elections at every opportunity. It nominated nine candidates in the Transvaal municipal elections of October 1915. Two, Colin Wade at Germiston and J. A. Clark in Johannesburg, were elected. J. van Lingen represented the League later in the year in a provincial council by-election and came at the bottom of the poll with 138 votes. He won a municipal seat in Germiston in October 1916, while all other League candidates were defeated. This was hardly surprising, as they fought under the slogans of 'No Conscription' and 'Away with Capitalist War and Capitalist Robbery'. The League claimed that the result was all a revolutionary party could desire.9 Some 2,000 electors in Johannesburg, Germiston and Benoni had endorsed the revolutionary call to the workers.
Colin Wade contested Troyeville, Johannesburg, at a parliamentary by-election in January 1917 and polled thirty-two votes against Creswell's 800. The League's election manifesto denounced the war as a quarrel between national groups of bosses; it had nothing to do with workers, who were propertyless and therefore without a country to defend. Creswell's white labour policy was a fraud, since Africans were there to stay at the command of their capitalist rulers. The workers' salvation lay in industrial unionism. This would enable them to capture power and lead humanity out of chaos.10 Andrews and Bunting stood on a similar platform in the provincial council elections in June, with the added incentive of Russia's February revolution. They called on workers to emulate this example and ' claim domination of all the countries of the earth '. The final struggle for socialism had begun. If elected, the League's candidates would strive only for the downfall of capitalism and for industrial democracy.11 The mob broke up the League's meetings on May Day, the miners' union asked Forrester Brown not to speak on the League's platform, and both candidates lost their deposits. Bunting polled seventy-one votes in Commissioner Street, and Andrews, 'the foremost working-class name in South African politics', obtained 355 votes in Benoni.12
This series of defeats spread a mood of pessimism about the value of election campaigns. Like the anti-political faction among Crawford's socialists in 1910, some members of the League argued that 'vote hunting' reduced them to the level of the reactionary parties in the public's estimation. Moreover, the election of workers to office was futile unless they were backed by economic power.13 'Now is the time to run up the Industrial banner,' urged John Campbell. 'Now is the time to throw all academic discussions and abstractions to the winds and to rally the workers to Industrial Unity by immediate action.'14 A joint meeting of branches on the Rand accordingly decided in October 1917 that the League would not nominate candidates for the coming municipal election.15 De Leon's concept of industrial unionism, which would obliterate craft and colour divisions, appeared to be the proper alternative to fruitless electioneering and the dead-end campaign against the war. The organization of all workers for industrial action, declared the executive committee, was the great revolutionary fruit of an otherwise pointless agitation.16
Workers who rejected the League's candidates and its antiwar policy could not be expected to embark on revolutionary strikes. Like every radical party which has exhausted the possibilities of parliamentary struggle, the League was forced to recognize that only the voteless majority would respond positively to appeals for far-reaching social changes. To be taken seriously as a contestant for power, it could trim its sails to suit the electorate and compete with the Labour party in defence of white supremacy, or it could attempt to acquire a mass base among the oppressed. The decision to take the second course marks the great divide in the development of the labour movement. From this emerged a genuine radicalism, which accepted the consequent identification with Africans, Coloured and Indians in a struggle outside the bounds of constitutional politics. The International Socialists made their greatest contribution not by protesting against the war, but in spreading the vision of a single integrated society embracing all South Africans without distinctions of class or colour.
The vision grew out of the protest. It was the failure of the mission against militarism that led to a critical appraisal of claims to racial privilege. The League, wrote Jones after the defeat in Troyeville, could not hope for a large backing among the Labour party's constituents, the small shopkeeper and artisan. It was poised like Mohammed's coffin between the two economic bases of craft workers and the propertyless proletariat, who happened to be black and were therefore disfranchised and despised. If the League was not to be Utopian, it would have to develop their consciousness as a great emancipating and emancipated class. International socialism 'is nothing if not a virile propaganda to awaken the native wage earner, and with the native his white prototype, to a consciousness of his great mission of human reclamation'.17
The socialists reached this point slowly and with misgivings during two and a half years of increasing isolation. They had broken away from the Labour party to fight militarism, and not the colour bar; and they could not easily rid themselves of a belief in white supremacy. One advantage of the withdrawal, they claimed, was that it gave them 'untrammeled freedom to deal, regardless of political fortunes, with the great and fascinating problem of the native'.18 He was a problem, and not a comrade at this stage. They could not hope to free the white, they said, until they had freed the native. The possibility that the African would free himself did not then occur to them. He was not mentioned in their original statement of aims, or in their appeals for socialist unity against militarism. When the Durban SDP replied that unity would be prejudiced by reference to a white labour policy, the League evaded the challenge. The socialists were hitting the enemy where it hurt most, and would yet find time to clarify their attitude to 'such important matters as the Coloured and Native question'.19
The League's first annual conference in January 1916 defined an attitude to Africans m a resolution based on Bunting's 'petition of rights'. It called for the abolition of indentured labour, compounds and pass laws in the interests of working class emancipation; and urged ' the lifting of the Native worker to the political and industrial status of the white'. Dunbar put up the familiar pseudo-radical argument that there was not a ' native question'; only a worker's problem. Colin Wade suggested that Africans were 'biologically inferior'. Conference rejected both views, and made a concession to racism by adopting a modified version of the Labour party's segregation policy. The number of Africans employed in industry should not be increased until they had been elevated to the white man's status. Meanwhile, those in employment would be assisted to free themselves from the wage system - presumably by keeping them off the labour market. This approach represented no advance on the position taken up by radicals in 1912. The League was still paternalistic, a group of missionary socialists intent on bringing enlightenment to the darker brethren for their own sake, but primarily to save the white proletariat from itself.
The League from then on gave increasing attention to African disabilities and aspirations. The Johannesburg central branch made 'native affairs' a feature of its lecture syllabus. Africans were invited to the League's public meetings. Saul Msane of the Transvaal Native Congress listened with other Africans to the Rev. Father Hill of the Community of the Resurrection when he denounced the Natives Land Act as a barefaced attempt to force peasants into the labour market. The International hailed this as 'the first Labour or Socialist meeting with natives in the audience'.20 It was, indeed, a notable stage in the education of the Rand's socialists, who could not reshape their ideas until they associated with Africans on equal terms. The League provided the opportunity, but clung to the remnant of the old segregation myth. A leading article in the International of 17 March 1916 blamed capitalism for breaking down the 'ethnological tendency' to a 'natural social apartness of white and black The system compelled white workers to recognize the African 'as perforce a permanent fellow worker'. They needed his industrial cooperation to destroy capitalism. This done, the 'natural tendency' could be allowed free play. The conclusion that Africans, having made the revolution, would then tolerate apartheid was as absurd as any reached by Crawford's socialists.
The discussions revealed no more than a growing awareness of the African's role. It was marginal to the League's main aim of soliciting votes and preaching international solidarity against militarism. The socialists were inspired less by exhortations to combine with Africans than by the strike of Cape Town's tramwaymen in May 1916, or by the prosecution of Wilfrid Harrison, 'the most policed and summonsed anti-militarist in South Africa', for distributing a melodramatic protest against the horrors of war.21 Such events were symptoms of the class struggle, whereas the extent of the African's participation seemed problematical. George Mason found it necessary to urge an audience of League members and Africans in the Johannesburg Trades Hall to rid themselves of the stale nonsense purveyed in the movement about the African's mental capacity. Any man good enough for capitalist production was doubly so for labour organization. Since white workers were bribed to keep the African down, it was a waste of time to argue against their prejudices. The League should concentrate instead on helping intelligent Africans to organize their people. This admonition evoked no more than the derisive comment that 'George was a kind of Bobby Burns who allowed his dominant sense of kinship with the Universal Human to warp his judgement as to degrees of mental capacity'.22
The socialists denied racial prejudice and claimed to be guided only by good intentions. All they wanted was to protect a docile and ignorant people from exploitation. Africans would be excluded from government even under socialism until they reached maturity. Mixed marriages were objectionable not on account of colour differences, but because of the immaturity of the blacks. One correspondent of the International would repudiate socialism if it required him to have tea with Charlie, Jim or Sixpence. The editor replied that socialism did not mean mixed marriages: 'as to the evils of this both whites and natives largely agree '. As for segregation, only the combined pressure of all workers would compel the capitalist to dispense with the best part of his working force. 'The way to healthy social segregation is through Industrial Cooperation.' It alone would civilize the 'Kaffir wage earners' and purify the atmosphere. A labour movement that failed to organize and educate the unskilled was by that fact a movement of only a part of labour and would surely sacrifice the rest.23
Logic led to the further conclusion that socialism could not be attained without the African's assistance. Only he could save himself and in so doing save the white society. The argument was repeated often, with an assurance that a growing number of white workers were grasping the point. This was a delusion, Socialists applauded Msane for saying that the important thing was to educate the whites. Africans would join trade unions, which had been formed to fight them, he said, if the barriers were lifted.24 The socialists also needed education, however. Their emotions had not yet fused with reason to produce the passionate conviction that provides the driving force behind a genuine radicalism. They condemned the colour bar because it retarded the growth of class consciousness, not because it was an evil in itself. This was the fundamental flaw in their approach. It blinded them to the nature of the African's problems, and to the quality of his resistance to race discrimination.
The League's theory belittled the importance of social divisions other than class, and the value of combinations other than industrial. Nationalism, both African and Afrikaner, was said to be the nostalgic yearning of small proprietors for a vanishing era, or a false patriotism that blunted class consciousness. Africans and Afrikaners would turn their backs on nationalism when capitalist production forced them to work for a wage. Class divisions, said Andrews, cut across the colour line. Rich natives combined with rich whites to exploit the masses. The assertion suited his theory, and not the facts. He and other socialists distrusted educated leaders like Jabavu, Abdurahman and Grendon, the editor of Abantu Batho, the African National Congress's newspaper. Such men expressed loyalty to Britain, support for the war, and 'old-fashioned bookish aspirations for the vote as the be-all and end-all'. Wrongly described as a 'bourgeoisie', the intellectuals, lawyers and parsons of the national liberation movement were said to lead African and Coloured workers along the false trail of collaboration with government and the capitalist class.
African leaders clung to a liberal creed as long as they hoped to find relief in the existing social order. Their faith was being undermined by racial laws and a decline in living standards. Signs of discontent appeared towards the end of 1916. B. G. Phooko, a member of Abantu Batho's staff, advised his people to shun the recruiting offices of the native labour corps until action had been taken to improve the conditions of workers who were exploited under the system of colour prejudice. The paper published articles protesting at the effects of the Native Land Act and the treatment of African wage earners. Unprotected by labour unions, they undertook all unskilled drudgery, worked the hardest for the least pay, and were often housed worse than the white man's horse or dog. The Transvaal Congress was urged to make representations to the native affairs department for remedial action. Free men, who had been robbed and ousted from their land, were being reduced to further enslavement and penury. One day they would rise against their oppressors.
The socialists viewed these outbursts of militancy with mixed feelings. They welcomed the 'initial rumblings of a spontaneous, indigenous class-conscious industrial movement', yet complained that Abantu Batho was the mouthpiece of the government, the capitalist class, and the 'tame wing' of lawyers and parsons in Congress. The paper's 'racialism' was irrelevant to the labour movement. After all, white workers were treated essentially in the same way. The remedy was to organize not separate African unions, but one big union of all workers, irrespective of race. The 'volcanic eruption' foreshadowed by Abantu Batho would fail unless preceded by sound organization, and unless it involved all workers. Though whites might blaze the trail, mainly Africans would complete the process of wresting control of the productive system from the ruling class. White unions should be invited to discuss the formation of a common movement with the African National Congress.25
The League launched a campaign for industrial unions which would disregard craft and colour divisions, present a united front and ultimately take over the control of industry. A solidarity committee, headed by Forrester Brown and Andrew Watson, one of the nine men deported in 1914, issued a circular drawing attention to the erosion of craft privileges by the employment of women and other unskilled workers. The Building Workers' Industrial Union was formed in March 1917, partly in opposition to Crawford's federation. Carpenters and joiners at Durban, Cape Town and Krugersdorp agreed to admit Coloured and Indian tradesmen to the union, as a preventive against scabbing and undercutting. The typographical union proposed to admit Coloured and white printers' assistants who were being attracted to a benefit fund sponsored by the master printers for non-union employees.
These were meagre gains. The BWIU adopted an open constitution, yet never admitted Coloured and Africans in the north. When white printers in Durban struck work for ú5 a week, they refused to combine with Indian employees, who then decided to form a union of their own. No white union ever contemplated organizing Africans. Abantu Batho, taking note of the facts, warned its readers against collaboration with 'any section of white labour'. The socialists retorted that there was no colour line in the working class, 'however much some hireling Labourites draw that line'. Africans had more in common with white workers who fought against capitalism than with native property owners and agents of the Chamber of Mines In no country did artisans as a class 'descend' to organizing the unskilled. Africans would have to do this themselves. The League had no desire to ride on their backs. Its function was to provide disinterested education.26
Andrews, Bunting and Jones were then rethinking their approach to Labour's segregation policy. It no longer seemed feasible or expedient to resist the pressures that turned the peasant into a wage worker. He must go through the industrial mill, said Andrews, before 'anything can be done with him'. Only an 'urban, industrialized, highly organized force', acting politically and through labour unions, could remove the ruling class. Bunting thought that the Native Administration Bill of 1917 was meant to complete the work of the Native Land Act. Peasants would have to choose between starving in the reserves or working under whites. All parties in parliament, including Labour, wished to exploit the African's labour power, but the issue was not really one of whites against blacks. Only the organized power of all workers could deliver them from the Beast. The aims of capital, as expressed in the bill, might have to be attained before that power could take shape.27
Africans had no intention of being reduced without a struggle to the level of a landless proletariat. The bill reaffirmed the principle of territorial segregation; contemplated the addition of eight and a half million morgen to the scheduled reserves; provided for the final elimination of labour tenants and share croppers from the 'white' areas; and placed the 'native' areas under the exclusive control of the native affairs department, with power to legislate for them by proclamation.28 The policy behind the measure, said Dr. Dube in Cape Town, 'was really one of extermination. What the natives wanted was equality of opportunity'.29 The African National Congress met at Bloemfontein on 31 May 1917 to discuss the bill. Sol Plaatje, back from England, denounced Smuts for having said in London that Africans must on no account be armed, as this would make them a menace to civilization. Congress resolved to agitate for the defeat of the bill, condemned Smuts's speech, deplored the governments action in introducing the measure while calling on Africans to join the overseas labour corps, and reaffirmed loyalty to the king. Neither Smuts nor the government had 'any right to rob the Natives of their human rights and guarantees of liberty under the Pax Britannica'.30
The League protested publicly against the bill in March 1917 at a meeting held in the Johannesburg Trades Hall. It was an historic occasion as socialists demonstrated for the first time on the Rand against racial legislation that did not directly affect whites. Msane and Mbelle, speaking from the platform, hailed the display of socialist sincerity as a triumph over colour prejudice. Africans now knew that even in Johannesburg there were white men brave enough to assail in public the detested colour bar. The link between socialists and Africans might be tenuous, but it was being forged in spite of abuse from the daily press and the right wing of the labour movement. For fraternization with Africans widened the gulf caused by the split over the war. The extent of the cleavage became visible in the middle of the year, when Andrews and Bunting stood for election to the provincial council.
Workers and soldiers broke up the League's May Day rally and besieged the hall in which it held a social; manhandled Bunting, Jones and other speakers, and forced them to suspend their outdoor meetings. Bunting could not obtain a hall for his election campaign, which the League fought under the banner of anti-militarism and social revolution. I. Kuper, the Labour party's candidate in Benoni, concentrated on the League's nonracial policy, and accused Andrews of planning to extend the franchise to Africans. Andrews replied that all segregation schemes were doomed to failure. Either lift the native up to the white standard or sink down to his. He must be given the right to combine and withhold his labour. There could be freedom and justice for all only when whites dealt with him as a fellow worker and not as a chattel. Kuper then appealed in a Dutch pamphlet to his ' brother Afrikaners ' to vote for the Labour party's policy: 'First white then black', and no equal rights. 'Vote for Andrews and you vote for the downfall of the workers and the blanket or Kaffir vote.' The international socialists would allow their coloured brethren to compete in trades such as those of masons, painters, cabinet makers and mechanics.31
The League's stand against racism was the central issue in the elections, and probably lost it many hundreds of votes. So Bunting and Andrews thought, as they grappled with the problem of removing the white worker's fears. Attempts to reserve skilled jobs for whites, argued Bunting, could only lead to their displacement. Self-interest and principle dictated the alternative. This was to ignore colour, and rope all workers, high- and lowpaid alike, into the unions. Andrews singled out a central principle on which socialists could not compromise. Africans and Coloured formed an integral part of the working class and must organize either in identical or parallel unions. The former were the ideal, but the latter might have to be chosen on tactical grounds. All other issues were subsidiary, and would be settled through industrial organization. There was no need to worry about a transfer of political power, for instance. The capitalist himself would extend the vote to masses of Africans, as a bulwark against revolution, long before they became class conscious. Inter-racial marriages would decline as poor whites, Africans and Coloured moved to a higher standard of living and education.32
None of the predictions came true. They were based on an assumption that class antagonisms would dissolve colour prejudice. In fact, white workers entered into an alliance with capitalists, were absorbed in the racial elite, shared its privileges and also the burden of keeping the darker man in subjection. Andrews and his associates were not blind to these possibilities. 'The governing class,' wrote Jones in April 1918, 'must almost be called the governing race.' Most white workers, skilled and unskilled, identified themselves with 'their top exploiters' and refused to free the African. And, he predicted, 'white capitalists and white artisans will unite and fight like demons to keep the native proletariat "in its place".' The socialists refused to believe that the betrayal of class principles was inevitable. Indeed white workers were yet to fight their gravest battle before they would be accepted fully into the lower ranks of the ruling hierarchy. The die had not been cast by the end of the war.