The National Question
My Perspective
As conventionally understood in South Africa, as elsewhere, the National Question concerns the oppression of one or a number of other people/s by a dominant colonial power. Consequently, the right to self-determination or to national freedom/independence does not apply to the dominant group, but is applied exclusively to the oppressed or dominated group.
In looking into the National Question", we should not only look at South Africa but also in Africa and its diaspora. The resolution of the question is to be attained through the struggle for the political and economic liberation of the African people. This means: the establishment of a post-colonial and/or post-apartheid state as the foundation of the nation-state-in-the-making; the latter's (political) capacity to resolve such economic questions as the land question; the question of wages and an improved standard of living; the social question, as is reflected in the democratisation of the education and health systems; the liberation from those forms of oppression and exploitation that characterised the colonial and/or apartheid period; and, therefore, the restoration of the dignity of the African person after centuries of white domination.
The National Question in Africa has to be understood in terms of: the historical, political and economic factors that also define the process whereby Africa and Africans were relegated in the international division of labour; the European expansion that began in the fifteenth century and saw Africa "discovered" and (under) "developed" as a geopolitical concept within the global parameters of a voracious Caucasian onslaught; the trans-Atlantic slave trade through which Africans were dehumanised, pillaged and transported as mere commodities across the oceans; the colonial era during which the mother continent was balkanised, parceled out among the European powers, and whole peoples dispossessed of their political sovereignty, economic rights and sheer capacity; the current neo-colonial period during which, notwithstanding the gains made with the attainment of political independence and the establishment of the nation-state-in-the-making, still find Africa and the Africans at the bottom of the heap of human existence and development.
Therefore, the post-independence track record has to be assessed in relation to the post-colonial state's capacity to resolve the National Question.
For, as Amilcar Cabral stated, for Africans the world over, the resolution of the National Question must include the successful struggle towards the rectification of our history:
It is this history, which the colonialists have taken from us. The colonialists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them right at the back, to follow the progress of their history. Today, in taking up arms to liberate ourselves, in following the example of other peoples who have taken up arms to liberate themselves, we want to return to our history by our own means and through our own sacrifices. As we celebrate ten years of democracy, we continue to starve, sleep in shacks, drink contaminated water, use candles and paraffin stoves – still the National Question has not been addressed, we have “two economies”, this has been a major shift in the congresses mindset as we used to refer to “two nations”. The struggle is not racial, but economical. (Debates around the National Question were profound in the late 20th century within the congress movement).
Race, Class and the National Question
The National question exists in two forms:
1. The racially inclined question – grounded in our history, colonial interruption of the plight of Africans. The stringent segmentations, the inferiority complex they imbedded in the hearts and minds of the African. The colonialist made the African chase after his beliefs, livelihood etc. He engraved within the black men self hatred and an inferiority complex – this however can be broadened by another debate at a later stage. This we call the existing “two Nations”
2. The economically inclined question – grounded in the economic status of the African. This is the root of the National Question, largely referred to as the existence of the “two economies”. This is embedded in living conditions, joblessness, exploitation characteristics of the working class – this is the class based question in our society.
Historiography of the National Question
The national question had been discussed by both Marx and Engels in terms of the political situation of their day — a period when capitalism was at its height and about to expand and transform itself into the worldwide complex of imperialism. The early writings of Lenin and Stalin contain dissertations on the national question, which view it as one of the phenomena accompanying the development of the capitalist system.
In his 1914 thesis on The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin wrote: “Throughout the world the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose populations speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements ... Therefore the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of capitalism are best satisfied ... The self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.”
What constitutes a nation?
In his famous treatise on Marxism and the National Question written in 1913, Stalin said: “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture ... It must be emphasised that none of the above characteristics is by itself sufficient to define a nation. On the other hand, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation.”
Stalin also wrote in this same treatise: “It goes without saying that a nation, like every other historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end.”
As with nations, so with the theory of national liberation, the Marxist laws of change and development operate. Theory and practice are interrelated and interact upon one another.
“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so it must be rejected.” — Lenin, On the National Pride of the Great Russians, 1916.
South African Socialist Evolution
Black political organisations existed before the socialist movement came into being. The Natal Indian Congress was formed by Gandhi in 1894, the African Political Organisation (APO) in 1902, the National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912; and there were other bodies. But most of these were sectional in their approach, lacking in both ideology and strategy, with a purview, which did not extend beyond the immediate interests of the group for whom they spoke. The African National Congress (as we shall refer to it hereafter) did not even have a constitution until 1919, the first draft having been rejected by the annual conference of 19l5. In its early years, the ANC shrank from demanding full equality for all the peoples of South Africa, and perhaps its greatest achievement was that it set out to unite all sections of the African people, it rejected tribal or ethnic division, and it proposed to take action. — at that time essentially non-violent — to promote the interests of the African people and obtain redress for their grievances. Though it undoubtedly stimulated African national consciousness, its approach was reformist and gradualist.
It was not until socialist organisations emerged in South Africa that it was possible to apply in practice the ideology of Marxism to the solution of the national problem. And here it is important to bear in mind the fact that these organisations did not spring into life fully fashioned with theory and practice to match the needs of the time. The most important of them, the International Socialist League, was formed in 1915 when a section of the white Labour Party broke away from the parent body over the issue of the war. Not all the members of the ISL were Marxists; not all of them indeed were international socialists; many of them thought of socialism only in terms of the white workers who, they thought, must constitute the vanguard of the socialist revolution in South Africa.
Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918 about the Bolsheviks. Could that admonition not also be directed at the South African national liberation movement (NLM) and the ANC?
Nelson Mandela has often remarked that we should not behave as if we are dealing with an enemy whom we defeated on the battle field. Implicit in this warning is that the enemy is still strong and might well have un-exhausted reserves of power and energy that he could marshal against us.
What remains unsaid, but should be read between the lines, is that the elections of April 1994 entailed a degree of compromise, some concessions and postponements, many of which took account of the enemy's real strength and untapped power. Others were made to draw to our side of the conflict vacillating class elements and strata who might otherwise have reinforced the ranks of an as a yet undefeated enemy. Yet others were made to widen the fissures and cracks within the enemy's own ranks and to buy time that would enable us to consolidate the gains made. There were also compromises forced upon us because we could ill-afford to jeopardise the larger prize - majority rule - in pursuance of a few uncertainties.
Since 1969 Morogoro Conference the ANC has held the view that the contradiction between the colonised Black majority (Africans, Coloureds and Indians) and the White oppressor state is the most visible and dominant contradiction within apartheid ruled South Africa. It has further argued that this contradiction could not be solved by the colonial state "reforming itself out of existence", and consequently, only struggle to overthrow the system of colonial domination would lead to the resolution of this contradiction. Moreover, it was our view that since the colonial state and the colonised people could not be spatially separated, there was no possibility of the two co-existing - as is the case in classic colonialism where the colonial power packs off its staff and goes home, leaving the former colony to fend for itself. In the South African context, this necessarily meant that the struggle would have to result in the destruction of the apartheid state.
The ANC always regarded apartheid as much more than mere racial discrimination, though of course racial discrimination was central to its practice. We regarded apartheid as a multi-faceted and comprehensive system of institutionalised racial oppression.
All of this was rationalsed on the basis of the racial superiority of the Whites. Apartheid was however also a racial hierarchy, graded on the basis of skin colour, resulting in a high degree of differentiation among the oppressed in terms of job opportunities, access to certain types of training, the exercise of property rights, etc. At the core of the system of national oppression was the conquest and domination of the African majority who were the most exploited and oppressed.
National oppression thus found expression in the palpable form of a number of economic, social and developmental indicators - such as poverty and underdevelopment, the low levels of literacy and numeracy among the oppressed communities, their low access to clean water, the non-availability of electricity, their low food consumption, their invariably low incomes, the poor state of their health, the low levels of skills, the generally unsafe environment in which these communities lived.
The Struggles Within the Struggle.
Proceeding from what we have said before, it is clear that the movement's own non-racialism and non-ethnic ethos is not merely a matter of high moral principle. The endurance and sustenance of these norms which many today take for granted, has not been unproblematic. The ever present racism in South African society and the ethnic and tribal segmentation encouraged by the White minority state were powerful currents against which our movement has had to contend.
The movement itself has consequently been the site of intense politico-ideological struggles around the issues of ethnicity, race, class and gender. During the 1930s, for example, a conservative section of the ANC's founding fathers led a campaign to expel Communists from the movement and to move it closer to the liberal fraction of the White establishment. At around the same time Dr John L. Dube, led the bulk of the ANC branches of Natal out of the mother body to set up his own regional organisation in opposition to the ANC. It was only in 1948 that Chief Luthuli and others were able to win back the ground lost to Dube branch by branch, until they could compel re-affiliation of the province.
At the height of the struggles of the 1950s a group of dissidents, led by Potlako Leballo, tried to manipulate the justifiable anger of Africans against their oppressors on an "Africanist" platform, a large component of which was also opposition to Communism. The majority of ANC members resisted these siren songs despite the evident emotional appeal of the "Africanist" slogans. The dissidents walked out of the ANC to constitute themselves as the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959.
How to Solve the National Question
Solving the national question requires that in the first instance we pose the correct questions and not buy into the mythology and metaphysics of ideologists. As in all instances, the national question in South Africa is undergirded by the material realities the development of capitalism in a colonial setting and the institutions created to sustain those productive relations.
To return to Rosa Luxemburg, we cannot hope to address these problems by uncritically embracing some of the temporary expedients the movement had to adopt in the context of a negotiated settlement.
Ethnic mobilization and entrepreneurship, in various its guises - including that of federalism - however still poses a serious problem and represents the gravest single threat of destabilization and subversion in our new democracy. The tap root of ethnicity and political adventures based on it, are apartheid and the artificial revival of so-called "traditional" institutions undertaken first in the 1920s then pursued with fanatical zest by Verwoerd and his acolytes after 1948. The so- called "traditional leaders" all have, to one degree or another, acquired an interest in these institutions. In addition to power and prestige, these institutions have become a lucrative source of income and patronage. Their propensity to reproduce new generations of ethnic entrepreneurs cannot be under estimated.
Our Constituency
The Mahlabandlopfu ANC Branch is situated in an area which is historically a white mans playground. The general institutional culture of Pretoria is blessed by Afrikaner symbols, pride, artefacts etc. it is then deemed to be difficult to exist as the MDM in such a setting. The biggest question however is how do we as South Africans co-exist with in impact in such settings? The national question seeks to address the power dynamics created by the ambivalent past of our land, it seeks a solutions to the problems existing nationally, the class-based technicalities. President Mbeki makes reference to the national question by referring to the two economies in our land. That of the rich and that of the poor. Ours then is to bridge this gap, conscientise our cadres and make of them viable engines of economically stable South Africa.
Reference:
· The National Question: the Vision of Steve Biko and the BCM
· The National Question: Brain Bunting and Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary
· The National Question in Post – 1994 South Africa – Pallo Jordaan
· Mayibuye, 5. The National Question and South Africa
By: Mihlali Gqada
As conventionally understood in South Africa, as elsewhere, the National Question concerns the oppression of one or a number of other people/s by a dominant colonial power. Consequently, the right to self-determination or to national freedom/independence does not apply to the dominant group, but is applied exclusively to the oppressed or dominated group.
In looking into the National Question", we should not only look at South Africa but also in Africa and its diaspora. The resolution of the question is to be attained through the struggle for the political and economic liberation of the African people. This means: the establishment of a post-colonial and/or post-apartheid state as the foundation of the nation-state-in-the-making; the latter's (political) capacity to resolve such economic questions as the land question; the question of wages and an improved standard of living; the social question, as is reflected in the democratisation of the education and health systems; the liberation from those forms of oppression and exploitation that characterised the colonial and/or apartheid period; and, therefore, the restoration of the dignity of the African person after centuries of white domination.
The National Question in Africa has to be understood in terms of: the historical, political and economic factors that also define the process whereby Africa and Africans were relegated in the international division of labour; the European expansion that began in the fifteenth century and saw Africa "discovered" and (under) "developed" as a geopolitical concept within the global parameters of a voracious Caucasian onslaught; the trans-Atlantic slave trade through which Africans were dehumanised, pillaged and transported as mere commodities across the oceans; the colonial era during which the mother continent was balkanised, parceled out among the European powers, and whole peoples dispossessed of their political sovereignty, economic rights and sheer capacity; the current neo-colonial period during which, notwithstanding the gains made with the attainment of political independence and the establishment of the nation-state-in-the-making, still find Africa and the Africans at the bottom of the heap of human existence and development.
Therefore, the post-independence track record has to be assessed in relation to the post-colonial state's capacity to resolve the National Question.
For, as Amilcar Cabral stated, for Africans the world over, the resolution of the National Question must include the successful struggle towards the rectification of our history:
It is this history, which the colonialists have taken from us. The colonialists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them right at the back, to follow the progress of their history. Today, in taking up arms to liberate ourselves, in following the example of other peoples who have taken up arms to liberate themselves, we want to return to our history by our own means and through our own sacrifices. As we celebrate ten years of democracy, we continue to starve, sleep in shacks, drink contaminated water, use candles and paraffin stoves – still the National Question has not been addressed, we have “two economies”, this has been a major shift in the congresses mindset as we used to refer to “two nations”. The struggle is not racial, but economical. (Debates around the National Question were profound in the late 20th century within the congress movement).
Race, Class and the National Question
The National question exists in two forms:
1. The racially inclined question – grounded in our history, colonial interruption of the plight of Africans. The stringent segmentations, the inferiority complex they imbedded in the hearts and minds of the African. The colonialist made the African chase after his beliefs, livelihood etc. He engraved within the black men self hatred and an inferiority complex – this however can be broadened by another debate at a later stage. This we call the existing “two Nations”
2. The economically inclined question – grounded in the economic status of the African. This is the root of the National Question, largely referred to as the existence of the “two economies”. This is embedded in living conditions, joblessness, exploitation characteristics of the working class – this is the class based question in our society.
Historiography of the National Question
The national question had been discussed by both Marx and Engels in terms of the political situation of their day — a period when capitalism was at its height and about to expand and transform itself into the worldwide complex of imperialism. The early writings of Lenin and Stalin contain dissertations on the national question, which view it as one of the phenomena accompanying the development of the capitalist system.
In his 1914 thesis on The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Lenin wrote: “Throughout the world the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose populations speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements ... Therefore the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of capitalism are best satisfied ... The self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.”
What constitutes a nation?
In his famous treatise on Marxism and the National Question written in 1913, Stalin said: “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture ... It must be emphasised that none of the above characteristics is by itself sufficient to define a nation. On the other hand, it is sufficient for a single one of these characteristics to be absent and the nation ceases to be a nation.”
Stalin also wrote in this same treatise: “It goes without saying that a nation, like every other historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end.”
As with nations, so with the theory of national liberation, the Marxist laws of change and development operate. Theory and practice are interrelated and interact upon one another.
“The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete cases, the part may contradict the whole; if so it must be rejected.” — Lenin, On the National Pride of the Great Russians, 1916.
South African Socialist Evolution
Black political organisations existed before the socialist movement came into being. The Natal Indian Congress was formed by Gandhi in 1894, the African Political Organisation (APO) in 1902, the National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress) in 1912; and there were other bodies. But most of these were sectional in their approach, lacking in both ideology and strategy, with a purview, which did not extend beyond the immediate interests of the group for whom they spoke. The African National Congress (as we shall refer to it hereafter) did not even have a constitution until 1919, the first draft having been rejected by the annual conference of 19l5. In its early years, the ANC shrank from demanding full equality for all the peoples of South Africa, and perhaps its greatest achievement was that it set out to unite all sections of the African people, it rejected tribal or ethnic division, and it proposed to take action. — at that time essentially non-violent — to promote the interests of the African people and obtain redress for their grievances. Though it undoubtedly stimulated African national consciousness, its approach was reformist and gradualist.
It was not until socialist organisations emerged in South Africa that it was possible to apply in practice the ideology of Marxism to the solution of the national problem. And here it is important to bear in mind the fact that these organisations did not spring into life fully fashioned with theory and practice to match the needs of the time. The most important of them, the International Socialist League, was formed in 1915 when a section of the white Labour Party broke away from the parent body over the issue of the war. Not all the members of the ISL were Marxists; not all of them indeed were international socialists; many of them thought of socialism only in terms of the white workers who, they thought, must constitute the vanguard of the socialist revolution in South Africa.
Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1918 about the Bolsheviks. Could that admonition not also be directed at the South African national liberation movement (NLM) and the ANC?
Nelson Mandela has often remarked that we should not behave as if we are dealing with an enemy whom we defeated on the battle field. Implicit in this warning is that the enemy is still strong and might well have un-exhausted reserves of power and energy that he could marshal against us.
What remains unsaid, but should be read between the lines, is that the elections of April 1994 entailed a degree of compromise, some concessions and postponements, many of which took account of the enemy's real strength and untapped power. Others were made to draw to our side of the conflict vacillating class elements and strata who might otherwise have reinforced the ranks of an as a yet undefeated enemy. Yet others were made to widen the fissures and cracks within the enemy's own ranks and to buy time that would enable us to consolidate the gains made. There were also compromises forced upon us because we could ill-afford to jeopardise the larger prize - majority rule - in pursuance of a few uncertainties.
Since 1969 Morogoro Conference the ANC has held the view that the contradiction between the colonised Black majority (Africans, Coloureds and Indians) and the White oppressor state is the most visible and dominant contradiction within apartheid ruled South Africa. It has further argued that this contradiction could not be solved by the colonial state "reforming itself out of existence", and consequently, only struggle to overthrow the system of colonial domination would lead to the resolution of this contradiction. Moreover, it was our view that since the colonial state and the colonised people could not be spatially separated, there was no possibility of the two co-existing - as is the case in classic colonialism where the colonial power packs off its staff and goes home, leaving the former colony to fend for itself. In the South African context, this necessarily meant that the struggle would have to result in the destruction of the apartheid state.
The ANC always regarded apartheid as much more than mere racial discrimination, though of course racial discrimination was central to its practice. We regarded apartheid as a multi-faceted and comprehensive system of institutionalised racial oppression.
All of this was rationalsed on the basis of the racial superiority of the Whites. Apartheid was however also a racial hierarchy, graded on the basis of skin colour, resulting in a high degree of differentiation among the oppressed in terms of job opportunities, access to certain types of training, the exercise of property rights, etc. At the core of the system of national oppression was the conquest and domination of the African majority who were the most exploited and oppressed.
National oppression thus found expression in the palpable form of a number of economic, social and developmental indicators - such as poverty and underdevelopment, the low levels of literacy and numeracy among the oppressed communities, their low access to clean water, the non-availability of electricity, their low food consumption, their invariably low incomes, the poor state of their health, the low levels of skills, the generally unsafe environment in which these communities lived.
The Struggles Within the Struggle.
Proceeding from what we have said before, it is clear that the movement's own non-racialism and non-ethnic ethos is not merely a matter of high moral principle. The endurance and sustenance of these norms which many today take for granted, has not been unproblematic. The ever present racism in South African society and the ethnic and tribal segmentation encouraged by the White minority state were powerful currents against which our movement has had to contend.
The movement itself has consequently been the site of intense politico-ideological struggles around the issues of ethnicity, race, class and gender. During the 1930s, for example, a conservative section of the ANC's founding fathers led a campaign to expel Communists from the movement and to move it closer to the liberal fraction of the White establishment. At around the same time Dr John L. Dube, led the bulk of the ANC branches of Natal out of the mother body to set up his own regional organisation in opposition to the ANC. It was only in 1948 that Chief Luthuli and others were able to win back the ground lost to Dube branch by branch, until they could compel re-affiliation of the province.
At the height of the struggles of the 1950s a group of dissidents, led by Potlako Leballo, tried to manipulate the justifiable anger of Africans against their oppressors on an "Africanist" platform, a large component of which was also opposition to Communism. The majority of ANC members resisted these siren songs despite the evident emotional appeal of the "Africanist" slogans. The dissidents walked out of the ANC to constitute themselves as the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959.
How to Solve the National Question
Solving the national question requires that in the first instance we pose the correct questions and not buy into the mythology and metaphysics of ideologists. As in all instances, the national question in South Africa is undergirded by the material realities the development of capitalism in a colonial setting and the institutions created to sustain those productive relations.
To return to Rosa Luxemburg, we cannot hope to address these problems by uncritically embracing some of the temporary expedients the movement had to adopt in the context of a negotiated settlement.
Ethnic mobilization and entrepreneurship, in various its guises - including that of federalism - however still poses a serious problem and represents the gravest single threat of destabilization and subversion in our new democracy. The tap root of ethnicity and political adventures based on it, are apartheid and the artificial revival of so-called "traditional" institutions undertaken first in the 1920s then pursued with fanatical zest by Verwoerd and his acolytes after 1948. The so- called "traditional leaders" all have, to one degree or another, acquired an interest in these institutions. In addition to power and prestige, these institutions have become a lucrative source of income and patronage. Their propensity to reproduce new generations of ethnic entrepreneurs cannot be under estimated.
Our Constituency
The Mahlabandlopfu ANC Branch is situated in an area which is historically a white mans playground. The general institutional culture of Pretoria is blessed by Afrikaner symbols, pride, artefacts etc. it is then deemed to be difficult to exist as the MDM in such a setting. The biggest question however is how do we as South Africans co-exist with in impact in such settings? The national question seeks to address the power dynamics created by the ambivalent past of our land, it seeks a solutions to the problems existing nationally, the class-based technicalities. President Mbeki makes reference to the national question by referring to the two economies in our land. That of the rich and that of the poor. Ours then is to bridge this gap, conscientise our cadres and make of them viable engines of economically stable South Africa.
Reference:
· The National Question: the Vision of Steve Biko and the BCM
· The National Question: Brain Bunting and Moses Kotane, South African Revolutionary
· The National Question in Post – 1994 South Africa – Pallo Jordaan
· Mayibuye, 5. The National Question and South Africa
By: Mihlali Gqada
posted by Woman of Sparta (Spartans) @ 2:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home