Revolutions in my Life
By Baruch Hirson
Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995. 392 pp., approx. $25 + postage (fax 27 11 484 5971 for exact price)
Reviewed by Norm Dixon.
Baruch Hirson is best known outside South Africa for his influential history of the 1976 Soweto uprising, Year of Fire, Year of Ash. Hirson has been a long-time socialist activist — a Trotskyist, a trade union organiser, an academic, scientist and political prisoner.
Revolutions in my Life, his highly readable autobiography, sheds light on a part of the South African left which rarely earns more than a footnote or two in accounts of the struggle against apartheid. It is also a moving account of his nine long years in jail.
Hirson was born in 1921 into a poor Jewish Johannesburg family who had fled their native Latvia. Politics impinged only indirectly on his youth. He provides a fascinating insight into the social, psychological and political factors that help explain the South African Jewish community's sceptical acceptance of the racist system and the relatively large number of socialists and anti-apartheid activists who came out of that community.
Hirson's political life began almost accidentally in 1939, when he joined a Zionist youth group, more in anticipation of the social life than for the need to combat growing anti-Semitism at home and abroad. There he was attracted to the socialist Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair (HH), whose main aim was to recruit young Jews to join the kibbutz movement in Palestine. Hirson became one the group's key organisers, first in Cape Town, then Johannesburg, and even travelling to Bulawayo in Zimbabwe to help a group there.
Within HH there was a culture of lively political discussion around international politics, especially how to defeat the Nazis in Germany and how best to fight anti-Semitism. HH claimed allegiance to the ideas of Marx, and the ideological struggle between Trotsky and Stalin was debated heatedly.
Hirson devoured radical texts on everything from the Paris Commune and the Spanish Civil War to the nature of trade union struggles and histories of the anti-imperialist movement in India and other British colonies. Yet this fevered interest in socialist politics and theory did not extend to the study of the glaring class and racial oppression that took place every day before their very eyes in South Africa.
In 1943, a Trotskyist group — a branch of the Cape Town-based Fourth International Organisation (FIOSA) — began in Johannesburg and Hirson attended regularly. Among the half dozen or so who attended were black trade unionists, the first he had ever made contact with.
His first impression was not inspiring. The small group was dominated by its leaders, and there was little discussion. "Everyone apparently agreed on basic principles and only wanted to hear what was happening elsewhere. This was an absurd way to organise a new Marxist group. The satisfaction of knowing that there were like-minded groups elsewhere in the world, the recital of facts and snide references to Stalinism were no substitute for serious study ... There was no suggestion that we learn in some systematic way about" the political situation in South Africa, the disputes on the left around the relationship between Marxism and the national liberation movements or the history of the South African left. Newcomers "had to absorb the issues by some osmotic process".
Motivated as much by personal differences as his growing rejection of Zionism, Hirson led a group of members out of HH into FIOSA, and in the absence of any other trained leaders, soon assumed the leadership in Johannesburg. FIOSA was soon embroiled in factionalism, splitting in 1944, producing the Workers International League.
The WIL, briefly, was perhaps South Africa's most influential Trotskyist group (the leaders of the better known Cape Town-based Non-European Unity Movement, members of the Workers Party, no longer wore the mantle of Trotskyism, Hirson insists). It produced a paper that began to influence black trade union militants. The WIL played a strong role in the famous Alexandra bus boycott when a section of the boycott committee joined. At its strongest it had more than 50 members.
The WIL's heyday was short lived. Within two months of the beginning of the historic 1946 mineworkers' strike, the WIL had imploded after a factional struggle. By the early 1950s, all the South African Trotskyist groups had dissolved or collapsed.
Hirson dabbled in the ANC's Congress of Democrats, heavily influenced by the Communist Party, and participated in the 1959 foundation of the Socialist League of Africa, which made little impact. After the Sharpeville massacre and subsequent state of emergency, disparate political elements came together to form the National Committee of Liberation, which embarked on an ill-fated campaign of sabotage. Hirson explains that "it was a false move, generated by a mood of desperation as the state machine clamped down on all political opposition". In 1964, most members were arrested and jailed, Hirson for nine years.
While fascinating and engrossing, Hirson's account fails to come to grips with why the Trotskyist movement never succeeded in breaking its isolation from the developing mass black emancipation movement. While he correctly criticises the SACP's devotion to the USSR and, less accurately, makes gibes at its "two-stage theory", Hirson never explains why the ANC and SACP achieved their support in the struggle, nor does he put the far left's failures under the microscope.
The ANC and SACP understood far better the importance of struggling around democratic demands for the end of racial oppression, whereas the Trotskyists crudely emphasised "class" demands, often abstractly, ignoring this key component of the struggle when blacks overwhelmingly saw their oppression through a racial prism.