(Paper delivered at the 2017 Carolina Low Country
and Atlantic World Conference on “Transforming Public History from Charleston to the
Atlantic World,” June 16,
2017)
Mark Solomon
In 1955, as the dark night of
apartheid was descending in force upon South Africa, the liberation movement of the South African people,
the African National Congress with its allies rallied 50,000 volunteers to
spread out through townships and countryside to learn the needs and priorities
(“freedom demands”) of the people. Those demands were collected and synthesized
into a “Freedom Charter,” a definitive expression of the democratic will of the
country’s majority. It was adopted by 3,000 delegates at a semi-clandestine
“Congress of the People,” convened at Kliptown, South
Africa
on 26
June 1955.
The list of demands in the
Charter was more than a recitation of a growing movement’s aspirations. Those
demands recapitulated the historic experience of the South African people’s struggle
for freedom and of ANC’s experience since its founding in 1912. Crucially, they
constituted the vision of a liberated society and a strategy for attaining that
liberation.
A vision is essential to all
transformative movements. Without one, a movement is rudderless, without clear
objectives and purpose. That can be fatal to the clarity and fighting capacity
of the movement. The vision inherent in the Ten Demands that constituted the
core of the Charter was grounded an analysis of the past and present social
realities of life in South Africa. That analysis located the country’s brutal white
supremacy in the nation’s capitalist system enforced with military brutality to
protect and aggrandize the intense exploitation of the native black majority
and other oppressed nationalities.
The vision of a liberated South Africa was manifested in the Charter’s opening words: “We,
the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
that South
Africa
belongs to all who live in it….” An apartheid government rules on “injustice
and inequality” without the will of the people who have been “robbed of their
birthright to land, liberty and peace.” That declaration committed the
liberation movement to a future of equality – with equal rights and opportunities
for all without distinction based on color, race, sex or belief.
The emotional and political
heart of the Charter was a pledge to build a democracy that pervaded every
aspect of South African life. That meant free universal education shorn of the
color line, an end to segregated slums and a commitment to decent housing for
all. It meant universal health care founded on an end to hunger, reproductive
choice and special care for mothers and children.
In a society with a multitude
of ethnic and tribal groups, all were guaranteed the right to their own
languages and cultures and “protected by law” against insults and white
supremacist attacks on the group’s race and national pride.
At the heart of the Charter’s
vision was a contention that substantive democracy required deep structural and
institutional change in South Africa’s economy – change that deeply transformed
not just the country’s politics and culture, but its economic structure as
well. Thus, the Charter advanced a vision of restoring the country’s wealth to
its people. That meant people’s ownership of mineral wealth beneath the soil as
well as banks and monopolized industry. It meant that every South African had
an equal right to training in crafts and professions. All racial restrictions
on ownership of land would end. Forced labor and farm prisons would be
abolished.
That vision of economic equality
is yet to be realized. The liberation of economic institutions has proved to be
harder to achieve than political progress towards equality. The promise of land
reform and re-division of lands among working farmers also has not been
achieved. However, that struggle in South Africa for a decent life goes on in the face of neo-liberal
globalization generated by transnational capital. That globalization has led to
a frontal assault upon working people around the word – driving wages down, assaulting
labor’s rights, accelerating inequality, bankrupting peripheral countries,
engaging in seemingly endless wars and uprooting populations, thus creating
vast numbers of refugees.
Against that background, many
of the Charter’s social and cultural objectives have been stymied by globalized
corporate power. Yet, the Freedom Charter remains a guidepost to emancipation.
The Charter’s vision of a just
society became the basis for one of the most progressive constitutions in the
world – one that aspires to full citizen participation at every level of
government. One person, one vote is constitutionally guaranteed, as is equal
pay for equal work. No South African can be imprisoned without a fair trial;
punishment for crimes aim at re-education, not vengeance; all laws that
discriminate based on gender, race, color or belief have been repealed. An
indivisible right to speak, to organize, to publish, to form trade unions, etc.
is assured.
The Freedom Charter in 1955
recognized the inseparable link between peace and domestic development. It
embraced the principle of self-determination for all and the transcendent need
to advance diplomacy over war, recognizing that genuine social progress can
advance only with peace.
On its second day, the
Kliptown conference was broken up by police with Nelson Mandela in disguise, barely
escaping arrest. Before their departure, the delegates shouted approval of the
Charter with pledges that they will fight side by side throughout their lives
until liberation is won. The Charter guided the long struggle for freedom
through massive non-violent resistance and armed struggle when conditions
warranted such an approach.
The Freedom Charter embedded
a strategy along with its vision of liberation. That strategy was based on
building a mass multiracial movement aimed at establishing a non-racial South Africa. Thus, the Charter addressed the needs and demands of
a multitude of constituencies – forging unity out of diversity – unity that
would eventually overwhelm the apartheid system.
At the core of the strategic
building of a freedom majority was an historic alliance of the ANC with COSATU,
the prime union sector of the predominantly black working class and the South
African Communist Party, which since the 1ate 1920s had been a principled force
in opposing the white supremacist regime. That alliance, under the leadership
of Mandela and colleagues, most of whom, spent more than a quarter century in
apartheid prisons, built a powerful international movement, advancing worldwide
support for liberation through a massive campaign of boycott, divestment and
sanctions that played a critical role in bringing the racist regime to its knees.
In the fall of 1979, the
Reverend Jesse Jackson asked legendary labor organizer, activist, writer and
former international liaison for Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern
Christian Leadership Council, Jack O’Dell to join him on a ten-day visit to South Africa coordinated by the ANC.
Jack O’Dell writes,
“Everywhere we went, from Cape Town to Durban, from Port Elizabeth to
Johannesburg, the Freedom Charter would come up … in our conversations.”
Despite the ruthlessness of the regime, the Charter “united the freedom
movement in all of its sectors to inspire hope and confidence in ultimate
victory.”
The Freedom Charter remained
in Jack O’Dell’s intellect, in his activist persona and in his heart. He noted
that the Charter was promulgated in 1955, a year still enveloped in the oppressive
force of the Cold War and institutional racism. Nineteen-Fifty-Five was also a
time of ground breaking transformative events: the Bandung Conference in Indonesia that gave birth to the movement of non-aligned
nations and the Montgomery Bus Boycott that spurred the mass movement against
segregation and launched a new stage in the historic civil rights movement. For
Jack, all three events were “seminal” in their own right.
Of greatest significance,
those events took place in the darkest of times, confirming that even under the
most oppressive circumstances, resistance stirs, visions of justice emerge and
masses awaken to new possibilities for a better life and a better world.
Today, we are witnessing the
emergence of right wing nationalism around the world and at home – exploiting
anger and resentment over perceived abandonment by political power and fueled
by racism, homophobia and misogyny. At the same time, we are witnessing an
upsurge of resistance to that nationalism and its disastrous undermining of
democratic rights. Millions of women, communities of color and working people
are mobilizing to fight back in the streets and at the ballot box.
(The stunning success in recent days of the
British Labor Party led by Jeremy Corbin, is a striking confirmation of the
powerful impact and enthusiastic public embrace of a political program
unambiguously grounded in the fight against austerity and for social justice
embodied in the Party’s forward-looking manifesto “For the Many, Not the Few.”)
In the present climate of
crisis and opportunity, Jack O’Dell has brought forward the Democracy Charter
in the spirit of the South African Freedom Charter. It aspires to be a starting
point for a national discussion aimed a building a consensus vision and program
for urgently needed change. The Democracy Charter seeks to end the
fragmentation of progressive groups divided into s a multitude of disconnected
single-issue organizations that sap the vitality of the movement.
The Democracy Charter affirms
the inseparability of issues and the need for connection and cooperation among all
progressive forces fighting on a variety of fronts. The Democracy Charter
demolishes the artificial separation between so-called identity politics (such
as issues of concern to women, to African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ, etc.) and
class anchored issues of deep concern to working people. The Charter connects
the inseparable concerns grounded in race, class and gender, demonstrating that
women and all racial, ethnic and national groups are inseparable sectors of the
working class. The Charter stresses “substantive democracy,” rejecting
palliatives that sustain the status Quo.
The demands enumerated in the
Charter require a deep and thoroughgoing advance of democratic people’s power
expressed in a qualitative redistribution of the country’s resources. In key
respects, the Democracy Charter is embedded in the country’s progressive
history, particularly augmenting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights”
unfurled during World War II that called for a full employment economy, health
care for all and an end to poverty.
Among the most salient points
of the Democracy Charter are:
A commitment to full
employment at a living wage with equal pay for equal work;
A farm economy based on
family farming and cooperative enterprise;
An end to homelessness;
Education from early
childhood to college as a public trust;
Single payer universal health
care;
A strong and fully reliable
Social Security system with undiminished integrity;
The right to be free of bigotry,
hatred and violence as part of an irreversible commitment to human rights,
including full recognition of women’s reproductive choice and the rights of the
LGBTQ community.
A prison system accountable
to the public that privileges rehabilitation over punishment;
Expanded public ownership and
management of resources central to the health of the country’s economy;
A new foreign and military
policy that is built on diplomacy, cooperation, the dismantling of over 700
military bases around the world, prohibition of weapons of mass destruction and
a reduced military budget commensurate with the country’s domestic goals;
An unqualified and unimpeded
right to vote and the right to have every vote counted;
Restoration, preservation and
protection of our natural environment as a vital social inherence for present
and future generations.
Inspired from across the Atlantic by the South African Freedom Charter and by the powerful vision of a
better country and world, the Democracy Charter can be a vessel of unity among
all who resist proto-fascism. It can be a foundation for beginning the long
transformation process of returning the country’s material wealth and spiritual
values to its people. It can be the basis
for building a “Congress of the People,” to facilitate the final draft of the
Charter and lay the groundwork for a vast grass roots movement for social
change.
The final words are Jack
O’Dell’s: “This is a great moment for
all of us as we confidently take up the challenge to create a vision shared
with the people all around us. … Recognizing and accepting this challenge is
the key to the success of all our collective efforts to transform our nation
into a peaceful, socially conscious democracy.”
In this spirit, we shall
overcome!
Mark Solomon is the author of
The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African
Americans, 1917-1936 (University Press of Mississippi). He is a past
national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and
Socialism (CCDS) and is currently an associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.