Living in Joe Slovo *By Jeremy Cronin, SACP Deputy General Secretary *
Read out by Robyn Slovo at the London plaque unveiling (commemorating the house where Joe and Ruth lived in Camden) on 11 July 2003. The occasion was also addressed by former President Nelson Mandela. Many of the township-born comrades of my generation, who became active in the liberation struggle in the late 1960s, tell me that for years they were wrong in one assumption they made about the already legendary Joe Slovo. To South African ears at least, “Slovo” was not one of those European names. It came as something of a shock, when, some years later, they realised Joe wasn’t black. Joe Slovo, black or white, remains a legend in our country. There are schools and clinics named for him (named, by the way, not bureaucratically, not top down by a government department, but by parents or nursing staff). This past week I was talking with workers from a granite-cutting plant. I asked them about their situation. “We live in Joe Slovo”, they said. Bertolt Brecht reckoned that to understand the dialectic, you must have a sense of humour. Joe was celebrated for his jokes. He also had an ingrained, dialectical turn-of-mind, it lies at the heart of his abiding contribution to our struggle. In the mid-1960s, the liberation movement had suffered a devastating defeat. Our internal organisational capacity had been smashed and scattered, our senior leadership was in exile, in prison, or dead. Why? White minority rule was such an obvious historical anachronism. The assumption that it would be swept away by the “winds of change” had been a powerful assumption of the 1950s and early 1960s. But now it’s 1970. And here we are, my generation. Apartheid seems stronger than ever. Secretly we study the guerrilla struggles in China, in Cuba, in Vietnam. We read about peasant armies led by Marxist-inspired revolutionaries. They sweep through the countryside, building rear bases and liberated zones. All of this provides morale-boosting inspiration. Yet, the very success of these other struggles starts to weigh like a judgment upon us. Is there something wrong with us? Here in South Africa, despite heroic attempts, we never seem to get beyond first base. It was in this context, in the 1970s, that some of Joe’s most important writings were produced. Some of them filter into the underground back home. In South Africa, he notes, the colonial power with its developed economy is not a far-away metropolitan reality. It is implanted here within the colony itself. A century of intensive capitalist development has transformed our geography. Dormitory townships are our Third World, not the guerrilla-friendly countryside of a relatively self-subsisting peasantry. The belatedness of our liberation struggle has everything to do with our relatively developed (not backward!) economy. This, we suddenly realise, is OUR dialectic! “it would be idle”, Joe writes in 1976, “ to dispute that for a long time the enemy has considerable military advantages from his high level of industrialisation, his ready-to-hand reserves of manpower and his excellent roads, railways and air transport which facilitate swift manoeuvre, and speedy concentration of personnel. But…and here comes the “joke” “over a period of time, many of these factors could begin to operate in favour of the liberation force…” Breathing down our necks, the apartheid colonial power was all too close and all too developed for comfort. But this sophistication, these free-ways and railways, cheek-by-jowl with teeming and oppressed Third World townships were also, precisely, its point of greatest vulnerability. This understanding of our reality was hugely liberating for the fragmented underground structures of the time. We were late, compared with many other Third World liberation struggles. But WERE we late? Or were we “premature” in our armed struggle? This was another accusation that greatly pre-occupied Joe in this period. His response is spirited. Yes, we have suffered a defeat, he writes, but: “Untimely inaction can often be as politically damaging as untimely action.” It’s an epigram borrowed from Lenin, but which Joe was to make his own throughout his politically active life. Joe was never a passive evolutionist. History, he knew, does not unfold, righteously, in a straight line. The right time for a particular action may not necessarily be the best time. Untimely action can make time. All of these “humorous”, dialectical insights, were, again, to enable Joe to make another decisive set of interventions. In 1990 Joe had returned from exile. He was a leading ANC negotiator in the process that would culminate in South Africa’s 1994 democratic breakthrough. He was living in Yeoville, the run-down Johannesburg suburb, in the general neighbourhood of where, as a young émigré from Lithuania, decades earlier he had settled with his father. He has written fondly about this earlier period: “The dinner tables were cleared by 8pm… and the nightly schools of rummy, poker and klabberjas (the most popular of all) would go into session until the early hours of the morning. Wednesdays and Saturdays were horse-racing days and there was usually a winner who provided a bottle of brandy to share with the bigger group of losers. Sunday morning outings often ended up on the broad pavement outside Cohen’s café around the corner in Beit Street, where small groups debated horse racing, dog racing and the world situation.” …And now it’s 1990. The “world situation” has dealt another of those surprise hands in the klabberjas of real life. The Soviet Union, which had been so much the lodestar of Joe’s life and times, is imploding. And yet, ironically, dialectically, the much-delayed South African democratic breakthrough is manifestly impending. Everything you have lived for appears to be failing. Everything you have fought for appears to be winning. What do you make of THAT? What Joe makes of this is of decisive importance to us now, in the present. In the first place, he does not go into denial about the collapse in the Soviet bloc. There IS a real failure, something has gone seriously wrong, he says to the incredulous in our own ranks. He writes his booklet “Has Socialism Failed?”. He answers his own question: No, socialism hasn’t failed, WE have failed socialism. But he is even more barbed against the Yeltsins (those in Russia, those closer to hand), who are suddenly struck by amnesia about their own immediate political past (“Communism - who, me?”). There HAS been a failure, Slovo insists, but it is AS COMMUNISTS that we will acknowledge this, learn from this, go forward. While he was carrying on this debate, Joe was also involved in the complex negotiations process within our country. There were those who greatly over-sold the negotiations and the eventual outcome in April 1994. They told us it was the “culmination of all we had ever fought for”, the “end of struggle”, “a miracle”. There were also those who greatly under-rated the strategic significance of what was happening. “Sell out”, they yelled, “we didn’t fight to have a government of national unity with the party of apartheid”. Joe picked his way intelligently, dialectically as ever, through this conundrum. To those who argued that we should first defeat the apartheid regime before negotiating, he replied with a wry smile, if we defeated the apartheid regime what would be the earthly point of negotiating with them? Of course, in the circumstances, we must negotiate – he argued. Compromise can be the right strategic choice, but for heaven’s sake make it compromise on our terms. Even compromise requires decisiveness. Indecisiveness, or obduracy will see us ending up in compromise, but going backwards. And now it’s July 2003. We have made huge progress in our country. 1,4 million low-cost houses, subsidised by government, have been built – a programme initiated by Joe, when he was Minister of Housing. But history doesn’t march in a straight line. The granite-cutters still live in a squatter camp, even if it’s called Joe Slovo. More cruelly, more unjustly, millions of South Africans, and millions more in sub-Saharan Africa, are affected by an HIV/AIDS pandemic. Yiddish is not much spoken in Yeoville these days. The exiles are from other pogroms – the Great Lakes region, Zimbabwe, the Congo. A young boy watches and listens to his father and uncles. They play cards. They discuss the world situation. It’s 2003 - a pity we don’t have the sequel Joe planned for his “Has Socialism Failed?” It was to be entitled “But has CAPITALISM Succeeded?”. Never mind, the granite-cutters know the answer. The significance of our negotiated 1994 democratic breakthrough is still being negotiated, day by day. It’s 2003 and the struggle, as Joe’s legacy helps us to understand, continues. …Dialectically, of course. -- You are subscribed. This footer can help you. Please POST your comments to [email protected] or reply to this message. You can visit the group WEB SITE at http://groups.google.com/group/yclsa-eom-forum for different delivery options, pages, files and membership. To UNSUBSCRIBE, please email [email protected] . You don't have to put anything in the "Subject:" field. You don't have to put anything in the message part. All you have to do is to send an e-mail to this address (repeat): [email protected] .
