The Rand Rebellion

I picked up this book some time ago when Rick Perlstein was attempting to identify the Trump supporters' ideology and what the short-fingered vulgarian himself believes. This was before the violence at Trump rallies became commonplace, before the "lion guard" brownshirts spontaneously assembled, and before the ur-fascism of this gaggle of nutballs was completely fleshed out. Perlstein argued that what Trump represented was a herrenvolk democratic tradition of white people getting preference and privilege, while nonwhites get the shaft. This was a new concept for me so after some searching I found George M. Fredrickson's comparative study in American (South) and South African history that promised to demonstrate historical aspects of the phenomenon.

It has been very instructive, but not exactly what the incoherent mass of idiots breathlessly parrot from their dear leader about making America great again. However I found this incident that I thought would be worth passing on. (pp. 232-4)

A major confrontation between white workers and the mining industry became inevitable when the immediate post-war period fround the mines in an economic crisis because of a combination of rising costs and declining gold prices. An effort by the Chamber of Mines to abrogate the "status quo agreement" led to the extraordinary series of events that became known as the Rand Rebellion. In December 1921, the Chamber proposed to limit the color bar to skilled work strictly defined and to displace about 2,000 semi-skilled whites by lower-paid blacks. Despite the refusal of the unions to agree, the industry announced plans to go ahead with this reorganization of the labor force beginning on February 1, 1922. In an effort to head off this action the mine unions were already out in protest against wage reductions. The strike escalated into an insurrection, partly because Afrikaner unionists (who by now constituted the great majority of the white miners) organized themselves into para-military "commandos." In the words of Fredrick A. Johnstone, "the traditional fighting formation of the Afrikaner farmers" was adapted "to a new setting, that of urban, industrial class conflict." The commandos were used to enforce the strike, drive away scabs, and eventually to resist the government troops called out by Prime MInister Jan Smuts. After the strikers had taken full control of the Rand, called for a general strike of white workers to support them in their demands, and begun to launch sporadic attacks on African miners, the government declared martial law on March 10 and moved in 7,000 troops, backed by bombing planes, tanks, and all the paraphernalia of modern warfare. Armed conflict raged for four days, during which between 150 and 220 people were killed and 500-600 wounded. The strike was finally crushed and its leaders arrested; eighteen were condemned to death anf four actually executed. The Chamber of MInes then proceeded with its reorganization of the work force by lowering wages and laying off a substantial number of whites. In 1923, a court decision declared the legally enforced color bar ultra vires, or contrary to common law, thus providing the industry with a free hand to make further retrenchments in white labor.
The white workers and other defenders of a rigid industrial color bar had lost a battle but not the war itself. In the parliamentary election of 1924, a coalition of Afrikaner Nationalists and the South African Labour Party drove Smuts's South African Party from office by capitalizing on the backlash inspired by the government's fierce repression of the Rand Rebellion and its general record of insensitivity to white working class demands for iron clad protection against African competition. The resulting "Pact Government" under Nationalist Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog re-enacted the mining color bar in a more explicit and definitive way in 1926. Addressing the long-festering "poor white problem" more directly, it also inaugurated a set of policies that included displacing black workers with higher-paid whites on government-owned railroads, subsidizing municipalities to permit hiring of white laborers at "civilized" wages, and utilizing minimum-wage determinations and tariff adjustments to force employers in the growing manufacturing sector to increase the proportion of whites in their work force. The industrial color bar and the "civilized labor policy" completed the basic pattern of government-supported discrimination in the South African economy. Whites were to be guaranteed jobs, artificially high wages, and exclusive access to skilled work--all at the expense of African aspirations. The foundations of industrial apartheid were laid.
To put this conflict and its resolution in proper perspective, it is essential to recognize that neither side wanted a free-labor market; hence it was not a contest between equal opportunity and legalized discrimination. The mine-owners and other capitalistic interests were responsible for the the primary act of discrimination when they combined forces and called on government support to hold down African wages and bargaining power. They thereby set the stage for a virtually unavoidable conflict between a disfranchised, semi-servile, and ultra-cheap class of workers and another segment of the labor force that had the capacity to organize and exert political influence. As in the case of the Chinese-exclusion movement in the United States, white labor had the one crucial advantage in this struggle. Although their position was not inherently more discriminatory than that of employers who took advantage of the vulnerability of nonwhites to hire them on terms that "free workingmen" would never accept, the struggle inexorably took a form that allowed spokesmen for white labor to identify their cause as that of white supremacy and thus tap the deep wells of prejudice existing in the larger white or European population. If the labor movement in California could appeal to middle-class xenophobia, spokesmen for white workers in South Africa could draw upon the rural Afrikaner's traditional conviction that the white man's privileges and security must be absolutely guaranteed. hence the immediate material interests of organized labor coincided with traditional racial prejudices in a much more direct and obvious way than those of the employers.
South African industrialists found they could live with the legal color bar--which was eventually extended from mining to other forms of industry--because it turned out to be compatible with their primary concern for maintaining a cheap supply of ultra-exploitable African indentured workers. The surplus of unskilled whites in the 1920s and 30s was only temporary (ending completely with World War II and the subsequent growth of the South African economy) and was largely channeled into state-owned enterprises like the railroads or the iron and steel industry (ISCOR), which could pay "civilized wages" because they did not have to compete directly with private capital and maintain a high rate of profit. Hence there were never enough whites available to displace Africans in low-skilled jobs within private industry. Furthermore, the bar to African advancement into skilled jobs helped rationalize the migratory labor system and denial of African bargaining rights. If blacks had no chance of advancement into the skilled occupations, not much was really lost by shuttling them back and forth in a way that limited their ability to acquire advanced industrial training. The transformation of the entire white working class into a "labor aristocracy" that shared with businessmen and farmers an interest in holding down and exploiting Africans diminished the possibility of class conflict among whites and may have served the interests of South African capitalism better than either a genuinely free labor market--which might have enabled workers to organize across racial lines--or a split, competitive situation that could breed the kind of dangerous and divisive conflict that had erupted on the rand in 1922.