Hammer and Sickle
A Distant Clap of Thunder Book issued to mark the Fortieth Anniversary of the 1946 Mine Strike <http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4727> A Salute by the South African Communist Party to South Africa's Black Mine Workers Published by the South African Communist Party, 1986 Part 13 Summing up So much for the history of the strike, from its small beginnings in the Transvaal ANC to its end in court, after a reported but never accurately established five deaths and 900 injuries and the end of the bravest ever attempt at miners' union building. What remained, apart from the debris and the bruises? Even now, forty years on, it is difficult to sort out what was lost and what was won. Certainly, the immediate demands of the miners were lost, and the strikers were driven back to work on precisely the same conditions over which they had come out. And their Union, built with such difficulty over several years was almost, if not completely, smashed and lost. The gains were less tangible, longer term, and to be found mainly in the consciousness and understanding of the miners themselves. They had gained - even in defeat - the knowledge that their unity could be established despite all the language, cultural and tribal divides; that unity was the first condition for any successful challenge to the conditions of their lives, and to the combine of state and employers which fixed them. They had gained, too, the understanding that where state and bosses combine together against them, there could be no way forward without the miners too uniting with their natural allies outside - the black trade unions and the movement for political liberation of the whole country which lived beyond the compound walls. But above all, they had learnt the power to shake the social order which is in the hands of a working class once it is determined and ready to use it. Outside the mines too, the trade union movement as a whole had suffered losses: the loss of prestige and confidence which followed its miscarried call for a general strike. But perhaps there too there were gains in experience and wisdom which would reveal themselves in the future - the wisdom that calls to strike are final weapons - not first, and that such calls succeed only where the masses have been fully prepared by solid organisational work, and their support has been argued for and won - not taken for granted. There was the experience too as a constant reminder to black organisation in South Africa that every mass action requires careful steps to preserve the organisational apparatus from certain state counter-attack, headed by the state's armed forces. So far as the African National Congress was concerned, the strike and the building of the Union marked the real starting point of a new departure. Its decision to sponsor such a Union marked a decisive turn away from its traditional sources of support - the educated elite and professional classes - towards a new constituency in the black working class, which is the majority of the urban population. In thus becoming an active participant in the events of the strike and after, it had turned decisively from a past tradition of parliamentary-style pleading with government, and set out on a new path of mass mobilisation of people for extra parliamentary mass action. The dramatic decision of the Native Representative Council only serviced to underline that turn. It, too, drew a curtain over the politics of the past. It announced the ending of uneasy African participation in dummy institutions of government as the forum for expressing black dissent, and the beginning of the new period, in which mass unity of the black majority would move into frontal confrontation with the white minority state. >From all of this, there could be no going back. Nor has there been. The miners' strike is long lost and ended; but the gains and new advances have been invested and harvested with profit by the whole national movement - unions and politicians alike. From: http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2626 -- -- 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] . --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "YCLSA Discussion Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
