South Africa’s Radicals: The Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Forgotten Wing

A Scissor Movement

Last year signals thirty years since South Africa held its first democratic election, marking the official end of apartheid. While certainly elite underlay this political transition, it is equally true that a coordinated mass struggle was central to the ancien regime’s demise: the anti-apartheid movement. In fact, this movement lay at the center of a broader global racial reckoning, both taking inspiration from and inspiring anti-racist movements around the world. Critical race scholar David Theo Goldberg for example, identifies the anti-apartheid movement as a “major historic moment of antiracist commitment and expression” that “galvanized a sense of the deep relation of antiracism to democratic political definition.” These struggles, he continues, “made palpable the integral connection of antiracist commitments in one part of the world to a progressively transformative politics around race in all other societies marked by the weight of racist histories.” Likewise, sociologist Howard understands the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as the culmination of a worldwide “break” in the global racial order, marked especially by the formal political inclusion of previously excluded racial groups. These analysts could not be any more unequivocal in their assertion of this movement’s global significance, heralding a worldwide shift toward formal legal inclusion.

This emergent tendency, however, remained orthogonal to capitalist development, which did little to aid racial inclusion. During an initial wave of decolonization in Africa and Asia, from 1940 through the 1960s, notions of developmentalism and socialism animated national liberation movements. A first wave of postcolonial regimes and activists sought to remake the world by affirming the self-determination of Third World peoples and instituting a New International Economic Order National liberation activists largely articulated this in the rhetoric of economic autarchy. By the 1990s, however, this project had largely collapsed, giving way to other priorities such as subservience to multilateral financial institutions, ratings agencies, and debt repayment. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the neoliberal turn in China meant that nominally socialist regimes in Africa and Asia no longer had wealthy benefactors. Socialism was fading quickly on the international stage. Just as racial self-determination appeared to be on the rise, economic self-determination had effectively collapsed.

In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC), sometimes referred to as the Congress tradition, lay at the center of this scissor movement. On the one hand, it represented the struggle for racial inclusion and democratization. Key leaders, such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, won Nobel Peace Prizes for their historic roles in challenging racism. On the other, the ANC ushered in a political economy that prioritized business interests including benefits for both entrenched white capital, domestic and foreign, and emergent Black capital. In practice, post-apartheid capitalism reinforced economic insecurity for the overwhelmingly Black population. After three decades of ANC rule, inequality is higher than it was at any point under apartheid; poverty and unemployment are alarmingly high; and white residents remain overwhelmingly middle-class, or at least absent from “the poor,” a category that remains nearly exclusively Black. Far from incidental, these outcomes were inherent in the party’s politics. In separating anti-racist from anti-capitalist struggle, thereby reducing the former to a “stage” and relegating the latter to some unspecified future, the ANC effectively sidelined the demands of a radical tradition that sought to challenge racism and capitalism simultaneously.

The ANC always presented itself as synonymous with the broader movement, and indeed, the future ruling party explicitly sought to establish itself as the leader of forces opposed to apartheid This helps to explain the tendency of academic observers to narrate the anti-apartheid movement as indistinguishable from the party Yet, the ANC was never the only game in town. In fact, it did not consolidate hegemony over the anti-apartheid movement until the mid to late 1980s. A wide array of liberation movements worked tirelessly to overthrow the apartheid regime, and many of them were openly critical of the ANC’s strategic orientation Most importantly, the movement’s radical wing challenged the ANC’s idea that anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles could be separated into distinct “stages.” In contrast to the ANC’s “two-stage” conception, radicals insisted upon the inextricability of these twin struggles. Severed from anti-capitalism, they maintained, the fight against racism would become impracticable. Not only did they insist that South African racism was a product of capitalist development, but they maintained that these two struggles were not strategically separable: there was no “pure” iteration of racism that was not linked to accumulation. This is why we call those to the left of the ANC the movement’s radical wing: they sought to confront both racism and capitalism simultaneously, which entailed fighting racism at its very root.

Our goal in this paper is to map the organizational history of this radical wing of the anti-apartheid movement. This is an incredibly diverse ecosystem of movements ranging from Black Consciousness to Trotskyism, and it has rarely been considered as a coherent wing. But here, we argue that all of these various organizations shared something in common: a forceful critique of the ANC’s two-stage approach. For the ANC and its ally, the South African Communist Party (SACP), the two stages had a necessary sequence: first the struggle for democratization, or what the ANC called the “national democratic revolution” (NDR); and then the struggle for socialism. But by leaving the criteria for achievement of the NDR unspecified, the door was left open for perpetual deferral of the second stage. For all of the groups described in this essay, the separation of struggle into two distinct stages would necessarily relegate the anti-capitalist moment to a distant and unspecified future Developing their strategic critiques within the “context of struggle the movement’s radical wing dismissed the two-stage approach as insufficient, toothless, and above all, ineffective in actually confronting the racist inequalities unleashed by centuries of apartheid and colonial rule. As an alternative, South Africa’s radicals offered approaches that prioritized a Black working-class struggle against both apartheid and capitalism simultaneously – or what some members of this wing termed “racial capitalism. Indeed, in some circles, the idea of racial capitalism symbolized precisely the interconnectedness of racial and class domination, and the necessary linkage of the struggles against them

We begin, firstly, by considering early challenges to the Congress tradition, including the first Trotskyist groupings and the All African Convention (AAC) in the 1930s, and the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in the 1940s. These initial efforts laid a foundation for subsequent challenges to racial capitalism. Second, we turn to the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and activist groupings around Neville Alexander in Cape Town in the 1960s. These forces, initially quite distinct, would collaborate in the National Forum, which rivaled the ANC-aligned United Democratic Front (UDF) in the early 1980s. Third, we discuss activists who sought to promote anti-capitalism from within the ANC, also in the 1980s, most notably from within its aligned labor movement.

Our intention is not merely to fill in historical details, but rather to highlight an approach to Black liberation politics that remains relevant to organizers today. The Black Lives Matter movement, which erupted in the United States but resonated across the globe has reinvigorated attention to racism’s systemic features. And as Keeanga-Yamahtta notes, capitalism is a key part of “the system behind systemic racism,” such that “racism is a permanent feature of the economic system, the system of capitalism.” Or as Arun has recently put the point, “Without such an understanding [of racism’s systemic nature], antiracism is more an exercise in personal development for white people than genuine structural change.” Anti-racism, as the title of his latest book insists, necessarily entails anti-capitalism. In South Africa, as in the US, entanglements of capitalism and racism persist in the wake of formal racial inclusion Indeed, some scholars have begun to characterize post-apartheid South Africa, much like its colonial and apartheid predecessors, as an instance of racial capitalism

Ongoing resistance underscores the limits of prior movements – against apartheid and Jim Crow – to achieve racial inclusion in any meaningful sense. In returning to the radical wing of the anti-apartheid movement, then, we point to a missed opportunity: a juncture when a different path could have been taken. This was a path that would have refused the false choice between anti-racist and anti-capitalist modalities of struggle, as if these two targets, capitalism and racism, exist as mutually distinct objects in the contemporary world. Recognizing this missed opportunity may prove useful to activists today – above all, in the wake of abrupt reversals of fortune. In the US, the militancy of the George Floyd rebellion in 2020 gave way to both liberal cooptation and anti-Black reaction. And in South Africa, the multi-year militancy of the Fees Must Fall movement in 2015–16 dissipated altogether. We therefore conclude this paper by outlining movement-oriented lessons that follow from the recognition of South Africa’s radical past, simultaneously anti-racist and anti-capitalist.

The Opening Salvo: Early Challenges to the Congress Tradition

The first round of radical challenges did not emerge in a vacuum. In fact, the ANC and its predecessor organization had been around since 1912, making it the oldest anticolonial movement on the African continent But until the 1940s, the ANC remained a fairly elitist organization and was notably disconnected from working-class and peasant mobilization Likewise, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) had been active since the early 1920s, though it too remained isolated from mass struggle in this period In its first decade, the CPSA practiced a white protectionist politics, with few organic roots in Black-led struggles, labor or otherwise We begin this section by sketching the contours of the ANC and CPSA’s emergence and stagnation in these early years. We then turn to the challenges posed by Trotskyists, the AAC, and the NEUM. While these formations might appear marginal in retrospect, we want to insist that the idea of their marginality is largely a post-apartheid narrative. In these early years, the AAC, and even the NEUM, actually posed a formidable threat to the ANC, effectively forcing the ANC to radicalize by the 1940s.

Since the early 20th century, the African National Congress (ANC) represented a key pillar of resistance to colonial rule and racial domination. Founded in 1912 (initially as the South African Native National Congress, renamed in 1923), the ANC developed an African nationalism focused on winning political rights for “African” residents. During its early years, the ANC consisted primarily of urban elites and traditional leaders, and remained largely disconnected from the masses This began to shift in the 1940s with the formation of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1944, which adopted a more radical stance. The liberation movement began to orient toward mass struggle, even attempting to organize mineworkers As the ANCYL took control of the movement, the ANC began to engage in mass struggles, including the Defiance Campaign against racist pass laws in 1952.

The Congress of the People in 1955 represented a crucial moment in the formation of what became known as the Congress tradition. It was a joint gathering of African (ANC), Colored (Colored People’s Congress), Indian (South African Indian Congress), and white (Congress of Democrats) organizations opposed to apartheid. The collaboration signaled the ANC’s emphasis on multiracialism, based on alliances between racially specific organizations. As Congress forces characterized it at the time, “this form of organization was not intended to legitimate racial separation,” but “was a realistic response to the fact of separation and race consciousness where it existed, and an attempt to bring people together into non-racial unity through joint activity Together, the Congress organizations adopted the Freedom Charter as their foundational political program. While this document does include a series of radical demands, from the nationalization of industry and mining to guaranteed land and housing for all workers, it remains focused on political and racial equality rather than the conditions under which these might be achieved. For critics of the Freedom Charter under apartheid, its failure to call for severing ties with imperialist powers or abolishing capitalism represented a key point of contention. In this sense it did not recognize that racial inequality stemmed, at least partly, from the capitalist division of labor and structure of property relations, including the fact that Northern capital dominated much of the economy.

By contrast, there was an explicitly anti-capitalist strand of resistance to the left of the Congress movement. By the 1950s, there was already a long history of popular resistance to the left of the ANC, most notably from Trotskyists who were critical of both Communists and the ANC. Trotskyist organizing began to emerge forcefully in the 1930s, following expulsions from the CPSA The Lenin Club, launched in 1933, held socialist study schools for adults and children in Cape Town, and later merged with the Johannesburg-based Bolshevist Leninist League to form the Workers’ Party of South Africa (WPSA) These organizations were primarily white but began to draw in activists such as I.B. Tabata, who was African, and Jane Gool and Goolam Gool, who were Colored. The formation of the New Era Fellowship (NEF) cultural society in 1937 was also key, as it brought together many of the leading radical intellectuals in Cape Town Responding to official efforts to control and exclude Colored residents, the NEF helped to launch the Anti-Colored Affairs Department (Anti-CAD) movement in the early 1940s. Ben Kies, a member of the WPSA, played a central role

These efforts culminated in the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). The NEUM formed in 1943 as an alliance among African and Colored organizations that were contesting new restrictions on voting and access to land. During the late 1930s, Trotskyists sought to promote a politics of class struggle within the AAC, which had launched in 1935 as a united front of Africans against racist state policies. The ANC had helped to launch the AAC, but the relations between the two organizations remained strained Crucially, whereas ANC leaders advocated participating in the Native Representative Council (NRC) – an advisory board for Africans with no decision-making power – Trotskyists prioritized “non-collaboration with the government’s racial institutions as a means to fight class collaboration and promote working-class independence. After ANC and CPSA cadre left the AAC in the late 1930s remaining members of the AAC joined forces with the Anti-CAD movement to form the NEUM.

The emergent NEUM organized around a call for unity among all oppressed non-European groups. It managed to unite African (AAC) and Colored (Anti-CAD) activists, though incorporating their Indian counterparts proved more challenging. The NEUM’s fundamental difference from the ANC, at this point, lay in its policy of non-collaboration: unequivocal refusal to participate in any colonial institutions, such as the NRC, which, they argued, only reinforced the inferior position of non-Europeans In many ways, the NEUM’s Ten Point Programme would prefigure the Freedom Charter in its emphasis on formal legal equality and redistribution. At the same time, however, the NEUM’s approach to organizing broke sharply with the Congress tradition, which encouraged mobilization on the basis of the four racial groups as defined by Afrikaner sectionalism: white, Indian, Colored, and African By contrast, the NEUM insisted that members mobilize as “non-Europeans,” prefiguring a political, rather than a cultural or biological, understanding of race that would later come to define the Black Consciousness movement.

The NEUM as an organization proved fairly short-lived, splitting in 1957 over the question of private land ownership. But the political influence of the NEUM was far more durable, particularly its strategic prioritization of non-collaboration and, for some, its leadership’s Trotskyist emphasis on “permanent revolution.” While the NEUM and its offshoots were not openly Trotskyist many significant intellectuals in the organization were Key NEUM thinkers drew on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution to argue against the two-stage theory of revolution, which they dismissed as Stalinist. As early as 1929, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, predecessor to the SACP), sought to establish “[a]n Independent South African Native Republic as a stage towards the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. Hostile to this language of “stages,” NEUM activists wanted to resolve the national and social questions simultaneously, conceiving of racism and capitalism as – as a single process and, therefore, as no “stage” at all. This opposition was not specific to South Africa, but rather deeply rooted in international debates. The Communist International (Comintern) inspired the ANC’s two-stage approach by directing the CPSA to build an “independent native republic,” and the ANC’s kindred notion of a “national democratic revolution” was inspired by a nationalist thrust within the international Communist movement Conversely, around the globe many socialist-oriented critics of the Comintern and Soviet-aligned Communism rallied under the banner of Trotskyism.

I.B. Tabata, an NEUM co-founder who subsequently founded the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA) in the wake of the 1957 split, argued that when it comes to questions of class and nation, “the second cannot be solved independently of the first. This is why non-collaboration was so central: it meant refusing to sacrifice working-class independence and anti-capitalist politics in the name of racial inclusion. This politics played out during the Pondoland Revolt of the 1950s and early 1960s, when APDUSA was involved in the militant rebellion against the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 This early apartheid legislation sought to develop a Black leadership in the Eastern Cape, and APDUSA saw this for what it was: textbook indirect rule.

The NEUM was also a precursor to the movements around Neville Alexander, who later became a key proponent of anti-capitalist challenges to apartheid. As a student at the University of Cape Town, Alexander joined the Teachers’ League of South Africa in 1953, helping to found the Cape Peninsula Students’ Union in 1957. Both had ties to the NEUM. Upon his return to South Africa in 1961, after completing a doctoral degree in Germany, Alexander joined APDUSA, though as Nai-eem suggests, he was subsequently expelled, presumably for his emphasis on armed struggle. The timing was particularly unfortunate, as Tabata himself would come out in favor of armed struggle less than a year later In the early 1960s, a small group of individuals associated with Alexander formed the Yu Chi Chan Club, which subsequently became the National Liberation Front, both of which sought to explore options for armed struggle in South Africa The effort proved short-lived, though, not the least because Alexander was arrested in 1964 and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Alexander was imprisoned on Robben Island for the next decade, where he engaged in with key figures in the ANC and other political organizations. This was a period in which the ANC was also moving toward armed, underground struggle. The apartheid state had banned the ANC in 1960, pushing the movement into exile, where it grew increasingly close to the South African Communist Party (SACP). The apartheid state had banned communists in 1950, encouraging the CPSA to dissolve before reconstituting itself underground as the SACP in 1953. Together, the ANC and SACP launched uMkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation, or MK for short) as the armed wing of the movement During the 1960s, MK represented what remained of a struggling Congress tradition. By the end of the decade, however, a new politics was emerging in the form of the Black Consciousness movement. At this juncture, the ANC played very little role in on-the-ground organizing, operating in exile, as it was, in London, Morogoro, and Lusaka. Rather, it was South Africa’s radicals who played a key mobilizing role.

The Anti-Capitalist Challenge: Black Consciousness and the National Forum

In 1962, the SACP released a new program called The Road to South African Freedom, laying out the tasks at hand for the national liberation movement. The document famously characterized South Africa as “colonialism of a special type” (CST), a “new type of colonialism … in which the oppressing White nation occupied the same territory as the oppressed people themselves and lived side by side with them. In the party’s view, CST demanded a two-stage transition, in which the forces of liberation needed to consolidate a “national democratic revolution” (NDR) – including, crucially, the eradication of legalized racism – before engaging in the anti-capitalist fight for socialism. The meaning of CST became a matter of debate, even within the radical wing. Alexander rejected CST as an inherently stagist formulation, while others, such as activists within the Marxist Workers Tendency (see more below), embraced the concept but “rejected the conclusion drawn from that [CST] by the Communist Party – the idea of a two-stage revolution, first democratic and then socialist. Nonetheless, the Freedom Charter effectively became the blueprint for the NDR, which the ANC officially adopted in 1969 as it grew closer to the SACP while in exile Activists in the radical wing of the anti-apartheid movement challenged both the reformism of the Freedom Charter – namely, its failure to call for deep economic transformation – and the separation of democratic and socialist struggles into distinct stages.

Prominent among these radicals were members of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). In the late 1960s, Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and other Black students broke away from the white-dominated National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to form the South African Students’ Organization (SASO). Rejecting reliance on white liberals, SASO emphasized the independence and competence of Black organizers. SASO activists went on to form the Black People’s Convention (BPC) in 1972 as an overarching body for the BCM, as well as the South African Student Movement (SASM) for high school students. Their organizing work laid a foundation for the Soweto Uprising of 1976, as well as kindred student uprisings that took place across the country. Crucially, the BCM operated independently of the ANC. With the bulk of its leadership in exile, the ANC was largely absent from the preparatory work of 1976 Like the NEUM, BCM activists sought to go beyond the Congress reliance on apartheid categories, which they viewed as fragmenting resistance. In contrast, however, whereas NEUM defined all subjects of discrimination in relation to white people – “non-Europeans” – BCM members self-identified as Black, a category encompassing all subjects of racist oppression.

Biko was clear that racism emerged, at least initially, “for economic reasons. He argued that racial ideology represented a “moral justification” for exploitation, leading to a fusion of capitalism and racism: “Capitalistic exploitative tendencies, coupled with the overt arrogance of white racism, have conspired against us. He was primarily concerned with cultural and spiritual liberation, promoting Black confidence, and restoring dignity against ideologies of white superiority and Black inferiority. Yet, he also hinted at the importance of challenging capitalism:

It will not be long before the blacks relate their poverty to their blackness in concrete terms. Because of the tradition forced onto the country, the poor people shall always be black people. It is not surprising, therefore, that the blacks should wish to rid themselves of a system that locks up the wealth of the country in the hands of a few. No doubt Rick Turner was thinking of this when he declared that “any black government is likely to be socialist.

The fusion of Black Consciousness as a cultural movement and anti-capitalism as a political and economic movement remained underdeveloped in Biko’s thinking. The fusion of the two would come into greater focus after Biko’s death, as the BCM developed into a number of subsequent organizational forms. It is worth noting that, at the time of his death, Biko was working to build unity with various formations, including the ANC, the Unity Movement, and activists around Neville Alexander The differences between the BCM and the ANC sharpened in the wake of Biko’s death.

Meanwhile, the apartheid regime banned all BCM organizations in October 1977, the same month that apartheid police killed Steve Biko while in custody. This pushed BCM activists into exile, mostly in Botswana. Many joined the ANC or the Pan African Congress (PAC), but others formed the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania (BCMA) as the exiled wing of the BCM BCMA activists insisted upon their independence from the Congress tradition, and would subsequently reunite with their comrades after returning to South Africa in 1994 Inside the country, however, the BCM continued in the form of the Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), founded in 1978. While AZAPO initially formed as a broad alliance of anti-apartheid organizations, it quickly developed into a cadre organization with a strong emphasis on anti-capitalism. As a summary of the organization’s Fourth National Congress put it in 1984, “AZAPO committed itself to the ushering in of a Worker Republic of Azania … The Azanian Worker Republic would, in turn, establish a classless society. During the 1980s and early 1990s, AZAPO became a key opponent of the ANC while continuing the legacy of non-collaboration previously associated with Trotskyists and the NEUM.

Non-collaboration and socialism represented key points of convergence with another strand of resistance, which emerged around Neville Alexander in Cape Town. After his release from prison in 1974, Alexander sought to build a broad front with other resistance groups though he quickly came to see the Congress tradition as hopelessly reformist and collaborationist. Just before his own arrest in 1977, Biko had sought out a meeting with Alexander. Their respective groups had begun to plan for a trip to visit the “armed movements in exile” to discuss building “a single united liberation army that would be complemented and ‘represented’ by the Black People’s Convention (BPC) as the legitimate voice of the oppressed inside the country” Tragically, the meeting between Alexander and Biko never took place, and the police killed Biko shortly afterwards. Alexander went on to play a key role in the Cape Action League (CAL), an alliance of approximately 40 community-based organizations around Cape Town. CAL grew out of a wave of mass mobilization in the early 1980s, which in Cape Town included the formation of the Disorderly Bills Action Committee (DBAC), a broad coalition of groups opposed to proposed apartheid legislation. The DBAC collapsed amid political and strategic debates, and its radical wing emerged as CAL, whose politics included opposition to the two-stage approach and commitments to working-class leadership and socialism

In June 1983, AZAPO and CAL joined forces with a host of other organizations, including Action Youth, Students of Young Azania, and BC-aligned labor unions to launch the National Forum The first National Forum meeting in Hammanskraal in 1983 drew roughly 800 delegates representing 200 affiliate organizations. By the group’s fourth meeting, it was drawing 1300 attendees, though only 125 formally registered Today, the National Forum is best known for the development a policy platform known as the Manifesto of the Azanian People, or the Azanian Manifesto which delegates adopted at the 1983 meeting. The document called for abolishing “the system of racial capitalism,” and identified the “black working class” as the “driving force of our struggle.” It drew connections between anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist struggles, calling for a “democratic, antiracist and socialist Azania,” a name for South Africa popularized by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). Carrying on the legacy of the NEUM, the manifesto also emphasized “independent working-class organization” and “noncollaboration with the oppressor and its political instruments.” The manifesto was especially critical of opportunistic leaders, and identified the “white workers and reactionary sections of the black middle class” as part of the bloc, alongside “the small minority of white capitalists,” that benefited from racial capitalism. With revolutionary, anti-capitalist goals, the Azanian Manifesto stood as a critique of the more reformist Freedom Charter.

For a brief period, the National Forum represented an alternative to the United Democratic Front (UDF), an umbrella organization that formally launched just two months after the National Forum, in August 1983 Yet, the National Forum did not become a mass-based organization with local affiliates. Instead, the coalition fizzled in the late 1980s as AZAPO, CAL, and its successor organizations worked separately. Meanwhile, the UDF was rapidly ascendant. Though initially established as a politically independent coalition supporting a unified and democratic South Africa, shortly afterwards the UDF embraced the Freedom Charter and the ANC The UDF thus helped to cement ANC leadership and the politics of the two-stage transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A full account of the National Forum trajectory, and its outpacing by the UDF, is beyond the scope of this paper. What is clear, however, is that the UDF’s politics appealed to a broader array of class fractions than those expressed by the Azanian Manifesto, facilitating both political support domestically and financial support from abroad Writing two decades later, Alexander remarked that “the overwhelming material and political support for the UDF eliminated the NF as a notional rival.

Throughout the 1980s, AZAPO and the UDF remained locked in a constant, and often violent, battle that claimed many lives While the National Forum proved short-lived, fizzling after only a couple years, its principles persisted among its component groups. AZAPO continued to push a socialist and non-collaborationist line, boycotting both the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) – the multiparty negotiations that established the principles for the new constitution and democratic transition – and the first democratic elections in 1994. As a recent statement explained, participation would have meant “giving legitimacy to a process designed to abort our struggle for liberation and to legalise land dispossession in the hands of the white tribe. Activists around Neville Alexander went on to launch the Workers’ Organization for Socialist Action (WOSA) in 1990, and subsequently the Workers’ List Party (WLP), which contested the 1994 elections. Carrying forward Alexander’s staunch critique of the Congress tradition for its excessive focus on the first stage, WOSA and WLP promoted non-collaboration, Black working-class leadership, and socialist transformation. The WLP barely managed to secure 4000 votes in the 1994 election, dashing any hopes of using the campaign to build a workers’ party. This dismal performance reflected a longstanding difficulty that intellectual radicals in the Western Cape had in developing a mass base, a challenge that extended back to the days of the New Era Fellowship and the Unity Movement The WLP quickly dissipated, though WOSA remained active for a few years.

Challenging Congress from Within

All of these various non-collaborationists (NEUM, APDUSA, CAL, AZAPO, National Forum, WOSA) refused to work in Congress structures. But other radicals took an entryist approach, attempting to push an anti-capitalist position from within. This included the Marxist Workers’ Tendency (MWT), a group of socialists aligned with the Militant Tendency in Britain, who advocated working-class leadership and permanent revolution from within the ANC as well as the trade unions Famously, the ANC suspended and then expelled four white MWT leaders in 1979 for pushing this line But the MWT membership was wider and more racially diverse than this narrative implies. From the middle of the 1980s, the MWT began to build cadres of militant activists across the country, especially around the urban centers of Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town.

Lesser known than the MWT was a loose grouping of activists known as the Workers International League of South Africa (WILSA), which first emerged in the late 1970s from student networks at the University of Cape Town but soon spread to Johannesburg and the Eastern Cape. Like the MWT, WILSA was a Trotskyist organization, though it was largely autonomous, without any affiliation to an international abroad. While initially working in their own organizations, such as the Western Cape Youth League, WILSA activists soon entered the UDF and the Congress-affiliated trade unions in the 1980s to champion anti-capitalist politics and working-class leadership from within.

For both the MWT and WILSA, unions represented an important site of struggle. This made sense, given that both groupings emphasized the centrality of working-class leadership. Further, there was a strong tradition of independent working-class politics within the unions, which could help to facilitate more radical politics. Reemerging forcefully in the wake of the 1972–73 Durban strikes, the Black trade union movement produced the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) in 1979, which became known for pushing a “workerist” position, as the ANC would deride it. FOSATU president Joe famously outlined this position in a 1982 address, which called for emphasis on capitalist dynamics and the need for a working-class movement independent of the multi-class ANC. On this basis, FOSATU rejected participation in the UDF. As one FOSATU seminar put it plainly: “because of the different class interests FOSATU could not affiliate to the U.D.F. Workerists opposed apartheid, but they stressed that “the complete emancipation of the working class in South Africa, both in national and in class terms, requires self-activity, class-based and bottom-up mass movements, organized labor and a project of industrial democracy. This was about building a “working-class nation” that centered “the working-class majority and the extension of workers’ control.

Other union-based left currents operated outside of FOSATU. This included a tendency within the Commercial, Catering, and Allied Workers’ Union (CCAWUSA), which promoted an “independent socialist” line. Key to this position was the need for political openness within the trade unions, rather than unconditional support for the ANC or the Freedom Charter This radical grouping was especially strong in Johannesburg. Nationally, the union was divided between the independent socialists and those who aligned with the ANC. Most of the FOSATU unions, as well as CCAWUSA, subsequently joined the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions (COSATU), which launched in December 1985. In the common telling, COSATU represented a “strategic compromise” between the so-called “populist” and “workerist” strands of the labor movement In practice, however, the merger weakened the workerist strand, as it assimilated unions to the NDR and the ANC Amid heated debates among delegates, including strong dissent from the independent socialist faction within CCAWUSA, COSATU officially adopted the Freedom Charter in 1987, aligning the federation with the ANC.

Also operating outside of COSATU were those unions with ties to the BCM or the National Forum, such as the Black Allied Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (BAMCWU). Many of these unions joined one of the two BCM-linked trade union federations, the Azanian Confederation of Trade Unions (AZACTU) and the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA). In 1986, AZACTU and CUSA merged to form a single federation, the National Council of Trade Unions (NACTU), which became a rival of COSATU. According to Murray NACTU’s founding program “included democratic worker control and unity, commitment to the national liberation struggle, and principled relations with national and international organizations.”

As the most powerful force advocating an independent worker politics, FOSATU decisions have been a matter of debate. For example, Legassick of the MWT criticizes FOSATU for “failing to join the United Democratic Front in 1983 and [in turn] struggle for a socialist program within it [the UDF].” Yet, he also remarked that they “compounded the error when in 1985–1986 they switched to uncritical support of the ANC within COSATU rather than struggling for a working-class program. These critiques illustrate the strong working-class politics of South Africa’s radical wing. They also illuminate one of the key sources of division: whether or not to work within popular structures that were dominated by the middle-classes and friendly to capital. Because FOSATU unions did eventually link with the UDF when they joined the Mass Democratic Movement via COSATU in the late 1980s, it is not clear that rejecting the UDF at an earlier stage was a consequential misstep. The bigger question, we might say, is the following: given that COSATU increasingly subordinated working-class struggle to support for the ANC, was it a mistake for FOSATU to join COSATU in the first place?

Conclusion: Movement-Oriented Lessons

The analysis presented here challenges characterizations of the anti-apartheid movement as simply an anti-racist challenge to the apartheid state, divorced from a broader struggle against the capitalist mode of production. While certainly the entirety of the anti-apartheid movement opposed the racist regime, it was also internally diverse and riven by opposing strategic goals. The movement’s radical wing linked anti-racist struggle to socialist transformation, insisting that the elimination of one without the other was both conceptually and practicably impossible. This position stood in stark contrast to the ANC’s emphasis on a national democratic revolution (NDR), which was far more equivocal about the expropriation of capital. For the ANC, racism could be challenged directly without simultaneously fighting capital; but for the radical wing, these two targets were never analytically separable. In practice, the ANC and its allies sought partnerships with all groups that opposed apartheid, regardless of class position. This included South African capital and pro-business elements of the apartheid state, as well as Western governments. Conversely, the movement’s radical wing prioritized building working-class power, seeking to construct a united front rather than a multi-class alliance or popular front. Some sectors of this wing took a strong non-collaborationist stance, while others were somewhat more willing to work with reformist groups. But they all agreed that building an alliance of working-class forces was essential to the project of toppling capitalism, which was itself essential to the fight against racism.

In excavating this submerged movement history, our aim is not to mourn counterfactual possibilities but rather to understand the relationship between the ANC’s strategic orientation and the marginalization of South Africa’s radicals. Let us be clear: we are openly sympathetic with the critique of racial capitalism developed by the tendencies described here, and we see anti-racism and anti-capitalism as necessarily simultaneous aspects of struggle. Further, we do not understand South Africa’s status as the most unequal country on the as a paradox, given the ascension of a liberation movement to power. Rather, the ANC’s utter reluctance to challenge capital helps to explain the lack of substantial redistribution in the democratic period. What went wrong? What can organizers today learn from the experience of South Africa’s radicals, who found themselves on the sidelines of the transition? We want to suggest three lessons.

First, we need to be alert to the constricting role played by those attempting to claim hegemony over a diverse array of activists in our movements today. It goes without saying that broadening a movement’s appeal is a good thing, and connection with the masses is essential. But developing strategies palatable to capital is a shortcut to mass mobilization with disastrous consequences for the struggle against racial capitalism. This was essentially what the ANC did, operating in that sweet spot between radicalism and collaboration, that in this paper we have termed reformism. And while ANC hegemony has been slowly unraveling over the past two decades the liberation movement’s ascension to political power yielded a standard narrative that actively works to obscure the diversity of the anti-apartheid movement. It is precisely this diversity that we have begun to recount here, though the scope of these politics far exceeds the bounds of this paper and will require quite a bit of additional research. This is not just academic intellectual history. It is also crucial for strategic thinking. Recovering radical alternatives encourages us to think counterfactually: how might our struggles play out differently if we adopt a more critical, anti-capitalist politics? And just as importantly, what sorts of strategies do we need to ensure a more equitable transition? Movements today should consider their radical wings to be a strength rather than an obstacle, incorporating their critiques rather than relegating them to the fringes.

If the first lesson is about maintaining a healthy skepticism toward a big-tent approach, the second is its antithesis: avoiding the pitfall of sectarianism. While many of the tendencies described here developed powerful critiques of the Congress tradition, movement strategy still requires a positive program. In articulating such a program, vicious debates often ensued: yes, anti-capitalism is central to Black liberation politics, but how might this politics be realized in practice? For some groups, this meant maintaining their purity, refusing to collaborate with liberals, the middle classes, and as was the case with some elements within AZAPO, white people. For others, it meant tailing the masses, wherever they might be. And in the case that the UDF was successful at mobilizing the masses, it meant doing entryist work in its affiliate organizations. But rather than understanding themselves as a constellation of movements working in tandem, these groups often refused to collaborate. This was not always the case, as the history of the National Forum reveals. But many of these groups saw themselves not as part of this constellation, but as potential vanguards of the revolution to come. The MWT, WILSA, and WOSA, for example, largely failed to work collaboratively. Theoretical arrogance proved fatal to any potential united front, a fact that unfortunately persists in South Africa today.

Third and finally, the analytic of racial capitalism developed by South Africa’s radicals is crucial to framing our strategies today. As they all argued in different ways, racial capitalism in South Africa is a particular consequence of its development trajectory, linked to the migrant labor system central to its mining sector. In the United States, of course, racial capitalism played out very differently, predicated as it was upon slavery and plantation capitalism. We might detect similarities between these otherwise divergent social formations – for example, the way that each country’s industrial sector was linked to the underdevelopment of a racialized labor force. But we can also observe quite a few differences. If racism and capitalism are articulated, and therefore must be challenged at the same time, the precise mechanisms linking them varies widely across time and space. The idea is not to develop some one-size-fits-all strategy to be transported from South Africa’s radicals to the world, but rather, to think conjuncturally with them. What might have worked in that context that could potentially work in ours? And conversely, what strategic differences are required to combat these two varieties of racial capitalism?

In short, movements are not only agents of struggle, but equally terrains of struggle upon which consequential political battles unfold. The story of South Africa’s radicals pushes activists to incorporate radical critiques rather than settle for broad-tent reformism; to ensure that ideologically driven sectarianism does not undermine the potential of radical groups to work in tandem; and to develop strategies that address the specific linkages between racism and capitalism in their particular context. The 1980s are now four decades behind us, but we still have much to learn from this vibrant period of South African history.