The talk, given in 1985, addressed how revolutionists should approach the revolutionary struggle, then gaining momentum, against the apartheid state in South Africa. Copyright © 1985 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission.
 

This state in South Africa--this capitalist state--is not a nation-state, at least not in a meaningful sense of the term. Only a small minority of the population in South Africa has any real rights of citizenship. This minority--some 5 million out of a total population of about 33 million--is defined by law as persons "of the white race."

There is no South African nation-state; there is a state of the "white race." In the geographical territory that the apartheid state controls, in what is today the country of South Africa, the overwhelming majority of people have no constitutional rights to speak of. Blacks are effectively denied the right to citizenship in the country in which they live and work.

The Black majority is itself made up of a number of peoples, none of which constitutes a nation. Within the Black population there are important differences in legally enforced social positions, which the apartheid rulers perpetuate and seek to increase through legislation, economic policy, and other means. By far the largest group of Blacks are the Africans, 24 million direct descendants of the original inhabitants of what is now South Africa. They have even fewer rights than other components of the Black population and are the center of the target apartheid aims at. Those the apartheid rulers refer to as Coloured number 3 million. There are also 1 million Indians--many of whose ancestors were brought to Africa from the Indian subcontinent as indentured laborers to work on the sugar plantations.

In the past, the term Black was most often used to refer only to Africans. But since the 1970s Africans, Coloureds, and Indians--those whom the apartheid state brands as "nonwhite"--are increasingly identifying themselves as Black. This evolution of the meaning of the term Black reflects the development of unity and consciousness among those fighting against the apartheid state.

The apartheid system has one central and overriding purpose: to organize and perpetuate the superexploitation of African labor by capital. It denies Africans the right to own and work land, and it denies them the right to compete freely and equally with whites in the sale of their labor power.

Apartheid has turned the African population into what, for lack of a better word, we can call an estate. By estate we mean in this case a part of the population whose legal and social rights are drastically limited in comparison to other sections of the population, a status enforced by the ruling power. It is a term we are most used to in connection with feudal society, not capitalist society. Nonetheless, it expresses the reality of apartheid. And it underscores the fact that apartheid is a qualitatively different phenomenon from the racial oppression that exists today in the United States.

Under apartheid, almost all Africans have been driven off the land and are denied the right to own land. They are without juridically recognized claims for equal protection under the laws of the state. To be born an African is to be born into that permanent social position, codified in law and enforced by the organized force and violence of the state.

That is what we mean when we speak of Africans as constituting an estate under apartheid. It is an estate similar to--though not the same as--the peasant estate in tsarist Russia as late as the second decade of the twentieth century.

This fundamental underpinning of the apartheid system is part of a broader structure of laws and institutions that define the economic, social, and political rights not only of Africans, but also those categorized as Indian and Coloured in South Africa. Coloureds and Indians, too, hold a juridically established subordinate position in South African society. Every African, Indian, and Coloured person in South Africa has a social and legal status that deprives them of equality with any white person, of any social class.

The apartheid system blocks the creation of a South African nation, a modern nation with modern producing classes. Apartheid attempts to perpetuate and institutionalize tribal differentiations through the Bantustan system (the reservations that the regime calls "national homelands") and other means. Apartheid blocks modern class development and differentiation, whereby some Africans--as part of a South African nation--would become free farmers, producing and selling their commodities on the market, while others would be able to sell their labor power on an equal basis with all other wage workers.

A South African nation does not yet exist, but it is in the process of being forged through the freedom struggle for liberation from apartheid. It will be forged from Africans, Coloureds, Indians, and those whites who will stay to live and work as equals in a nonracial, democratic South African republic.

A true nation-state in South Africa will be brought into being only as a result of the revolutionary overthrow of the apartheid state and the establishment of a new state-power. It is in this sense that the South African revolution can accurately be termed a national revolution. It is important to keep this content in mind, because in today’s world the term national revolution is almost exclusively used in connection with a struggle for liberation from colonial or neocolonial domination by another country. In South Africa, the obstacle to forging a nation isn’t occupation by a foreign imperialist power; it’s the apartheid state itself. To make the national, democratic revolution in South Africa, apartheid rule has to be overthrown.  
 
 
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