book notes
Revolutions in a life Richard Owens discusses four books by the South African revolutionary Baruch Hirson Hirson, B: Revolutions In My Life. 1995. Witwatersrand University Press, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg, 2001, South Africa. Yours For The Union: Class and Community Struggles in South Africa. 1989. Zed Books, London and Witwatersrand University Press. Hirson, B and Vivian, L: Strike Across The Empire: The Seamen's Strike of 1925: in Britain, South Africa and Australasia. 1992. Clio Publications, c/o 13 Talbot Avenue, London, N2 OLS. Hirson, B and Williams, G A: The Delegate For Africa: David Ivan Jones, 1883-1924. 1995. Core Publications, c/o 13 Talbot Avenue, London, N2 OLS.
Baruch Hirson's Revolutions in My Life is a very moving human, honest account of his life as a revolutionary. The Revolutions of the title refers not to social revolutions but to the revolutions in his own life, that took him from the close-knit community in which he was brought up in to the acts of sabotage that resulted in his spending nine years in jail. He begins each chapter with an account of his experiences in jail, and then goes back to an earlier part of his life; as if reliving those experiences during the long years in jail. It is a book devoid of comfortable certainties.
Baruch gives us a moving sketch of South Africa as he saw it as a child. It is fascinating follow his intellectual development toward revolutionary Marxism, breaking out of the rarefied atmosphere of white South African society. His dedication to research can be understood in the light of his determination in those early years to make sense of his world. In his late teens, Baruch discovered politics within the radical wing of the Zionist movement, the Hashomer Hatzair, a movement that encouraged extensive reading.
The drive among the Zionist youth to educate themselves was no doubt the result of the dominance of fascism in much of Europe at the time - and the increasing support for fascism among whites in South Africa. 34 International Viewpoint #277
Baruch comments on the dearth of information available to him and his comrades; the necessity of developing an analysis under these conditions must have contributed to his independent, inquiring mind. The problem for him and for the revolutionary left was that there was not a strong tradition of Marxism in South Africa -or a long history of working class struggles. Moreover, because of the paucity of literature in South Africa, they were not even able to learn from many of the earlier experiences within the left.
Thus the experiences of David Ivan Jones (1883-1924), the subject of Baruch's and Gwyn Williams' biography The Delegate For Africa, was largely unknown to Baruch in the 1930s and 1940s. This fascinating character left Wales, his place of birth, because of ill-health and in 1910, after staying in New Zealand for a couple of years, went to South Africa. He had first proclaimed his socialist convictions while still in New Zealand, but it took him some time to break completely with the paternalistic and racist policies of the South African Labour Party. He quickly became involved in the struggles, including the (mainly white) miners' strike of 1913 which ended when British troops fired upon the strikers, killing at least twenty and wounding up to 400. He broke with the SALP over their support for the War and was one of the earliest to call for the establishment of a Third International; he was later a delegate to the Comintern, as the title of the
It was during the war years that Jones began to stress the importance of developing black working class organisations. We give increasing attention to the native workers not because they are natives but because they are workers.... Our concern with the natives and our faith in them is our concern in them as workers, as potentially the revolutionary proletariat... Constituting as they do the big majority of those who do the work of the country, we want the native workers to realise that it is their historic mission to bring emancipation Everything is marking time for them. We also want the white worker to realise this.
One of the problems that Jones was tackling in this article was the problem of how revolutionaries should relate to national liberation struggles; a difficult issue that also troubled Baruch and his comrades.
One important trade union struggle that took place just prior to Baruch's time, was the seafarers strike of 1925 which he and Lorraine Vivian have described in Strike Across the Empire. This strike broke out initially in Britain when the head of the National Sailors and Firemen's Union of without consulting his members, offered the employers a 10% wage cut. The strike by the seafarers against both the employers and their own union leadership, was soon all but crushed. However they then extended the strike and the seafarers, when they reached South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, refused to set sail again. They had transformed their struggle into 'one of the few strikes of the twentieth century to have international dimensions' and the strike lasted for over one hundred days, causing massive disruption since international trade, communications, was dependent upon in those days. Strike Across the Empire is a record of this struggle as it unfolded in the three continents and the support that the British sailors found there.
Baruch's Yours For The Union is a study of the wide range of struggles that took place in the 1930s and 1940s in Transvaal, the industrial heartland of South Africa. period after the depression of 1929-1932 was one in which the economy of South Africa flourished. The resulting shortage of labour led to the passing of the Native Bills', an attempt to systematically channel and control African labour. This period saw the birth of African trade unions. In spite of the rapid expansion of industry both before and during the War, the battle to form trade unions was fought under extremely difficult circumstances. The task was made more difficult because much of the left, including Communist Party and the African National Congress, supported the War - and so opposed trade union activity during that period. One of the key figures in building the union movement was the Trotskyist Max Gordon, who was responsible for setting up six trade unions before the war as well as the Joint Committee of African Trade Unions (with approximately 15,700 members) of which he was secretary. Another sector of
struggle was that in the townships. Here the women played an important role and this is where the greatest success was achieved. The battle of the residents of the Alexandria township (near Johannesburg) in 1943 is one of the events described in this book. They fought against the threat to remove them to a more distant location and also against a decision to increase the bus fares, which they could ill afford on their meagre wages. They decided to boycott the busses; this involved, over a period of seven weeks, 15,000 people walking 9.5 miles to work and the same distance back again in the evening. Members of the Trotskyist group, the Workers International League, played a leading role in this struggle which, against massive odds, was largely successful. Baruch also examines the rural struggles which were influenced by the experiences of those who had worked the cities; and finally, the domestic workers and their battle to get organised.
In terms of tangible gains, these struggles achieved little. However, Baruch does note that in this period tens of thousands of workers had been organised, and even more had taken part in rallies, demonstrations and strikes. Some unions won notable victories and a tradition of struggle was established! This is a detailed, insightful record of a formative period in the fight for the emancipation of South African labour and a history that will be invaluable to the revolutionary left, especially in the new South Africa.
In Revolutions In My Life, Baruch describes his experiences in the Workers International League of which he became secretary and political organiser. He saw at first hand the appalling conditions under which the Africans lived when he went into African townships like Alexandria to sell the newspaper. This organisation had more support in the trade unions than did the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa of which Baruch had earlier been a member. The WIL worked in the Progressive Trade Union Group which included nearly half the trade unions in Johannesburg. These unions were very poor, with only the richer unions being able to afford a typewriter; at the same time most of them were heavily bureaucratised. Work in the trade unions progressed well until the end of 1942 when new war-time restrictions were placed on the unions. In the ensuing struggles, divisions within the unions, together with mistaken policies, led to defeat and a downturn of the trade union struggles which in turn spelled the end of the WIL, especially after the collapse of the Timber Workers strike in 1945. The immediate reason for the collapse of WIL was that some of the leadership retired to study theory. Dispirited by this collapse, Baruch returned to university.
The increasingly repressive nature of the South African regime and especially the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, led Baruch to conclude that sabotage was the only way forward. He became a founding member of the National Committee of Liberation which had that perspective. With hindsight, Baruch says of this policy: "The socialism to which we aspired could only be brought into being by an organised working class, and our action was taking us in the opposite direction.!' He goes on to say that we failed to take into account ... that the state had just inflicted a major defeat on its political opponents and it would take time for people to return to active struggle. They adopted the strategy of sabotage shortly before the African National Congress did and one of their successful targets was the blowing up of electricity pylons. However, the inevitable happened Baruch was arrested. Ironically it was the tight security in the NCL that prevented Baruch from checking on the significance of a breach of security - and this led to his arrest.
These books are all important records of the struggle in South Africa. Baruch is an excellent writer and a committed researcher and his books are invaluable both for the international movement and for the left in South Africa today. Strike Across The Empire and The Delegate For Africa are not available through book shops, but can be ordered by post from the addresses given above. Chris Harman, Economics of the Madhouse Bookmarks 1995 pp.1Il, $3.50, ISBN 1-898876-03-7
There has recently been increased interest in Britain in ideas challenging market orthodoxy. Paul Ormerod's The Death of Economics and Will Hutton's The State We're In reached beyond academic
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book notes economists, but were limited by lack of engagement with Marxist ideas. Chris Harman aims to fill this gap.
Harman edits the paper of the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Socialist Worker. His book is a lively introduction to Marxist economics. It highlights the irrationality of the market and gives a good account of Marxist views of exploitation and CrISIS.
There are some problems. Orthodox economics is rather caricatured. Harman relies on the SWP's theory of state capitalism and the permanent arms economy. This sees the post war boom as caused by increased arms spending. A richer view, such as that of Ernest Mandel, would also stress technicical change and class struggle. However, the book should succeed in stimulating interest in Marx's critique of capitalism and we should all be grateful for this. Andy Kilmister. The Secret Files Britain, WW2 and the Sama Samajists Young Socialist Publications, Columbo, Sri Lanka, 1996
Wesley S. Muthiah and Sydney Wanasinghe have dug through mountains of secret files documenting British persecution of Ceylonese anti-war freedom fighters, finally released by the Public Records Office, London, under the "50 Year Rule" This edited selection shows how the British imperial government persecuted, suppressed and incarcerated the leaders of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (one of Asia's strongest anti-Stalinist revolutionary parties) because of their opposition to the war. To order send a UK cheque for £9.95 + £1.10 postage to Wesley Muthiah, 27 Belmont Ave, Palmer Green, London N13 4HD Telephone +44 181 882 3423 To order, try your nearest progressive bookstore, contact the publishers directly, or write to : La Breche, 9 rue de Tunis, 75011 Paris, France tel. (+33 1) 43 67 63 57 fax 43 79 29 61 (English, French and Spanish spoken). Where no price is given, we suggest you enclose a donation of US$ 10 in any convertible currency to cover the postage costs of the publisher. To announce your publication in this free listing, send a sample copy to "Book reviews" c/o International Viewpoint, PECI, BP 85, 75522 Paris cedex 11, France.
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