Anarchism, revolutionary syndicalism and anti-authoritarian movements in South Africa, Lesotho & Swaziland

Anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in South Africa have a long history, although this history has been largely forgotten today.

Anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists were in the forefront of socialist groups in early twentieth-century South Africa. They played a role in the Social Democratic Federation, founded in Cape Town in 1904,. In 1910, two revolutionary syndicalist groups were founded in Johannesburg, the Socialist Labour Party and a section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

The International Socialist League (ISL), founded in 1915, was the largest and most important revolutionary socialist group in South Africa in the 1910s. From an early stage, the ISL was committed to IWW-style revolutionary syndicalism, and saw the abolition of racial oppression in South Africa as a central revolutionary task. The ISL founded the first African workers' union, the Industrial Workers of Africa, in 1917, as well as three other syndicalist unions for workers of colour: the Clothing Workers Industrial Union, the Horse Drivers' Union, and the Indian Workers' Industrial Union. In Cape Town, a new group, the Industrial Socialist League, founded in 1918, founded a similar Sweet and Jam Workers' Industrial Union.

Although most of the revolutionary syndicalists went over to Leninism in the early 1920s, founding the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921, some syndicalist ideas lived on in the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa (ICU). This massive black trade union, which peaked with 100, 000 members in 1927, had sections in Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe. However, nationalist and liberal ideology, and corrupt and weak middle class leadership, helped destroy the ICU by the 1930s.

It was only in the 1990s that organised anarchism re-emerged with a succession of groups in Durban and Johannesburg, such as the Johannesburg collective that produced Unrest and Revolt in 1992 and 1993. The Anarchist Revolutionary Movement (ARM), founded in 1993, represented an important step forward, as did the Workers Solidarity Federation (WSF) which replaced it in 1995. WSF incorporated a Durban collective that produced Freedom, and produced its own Workers Solidarity.

The WSF was a Platformist group that focussed on black worker and student struggles, and managed to win over a number of trade unionists by 1998. In 1997, comrades from the WSF made links with anarchists in Zambia, and helped establish a short-lived Zambian WSF. The WSF also distributed materials in Zimbabwe and had contact in Tanzania.

In 1999, for a range of tactical reasons, the WSF was dissolved, and is now succeeded by two anarchist collectives, the Bikisha Media Collective and Zabalaza Books. The two groups have recently co-produced Zabalaza: a southern African journal of revolutionary anarchism, and write and publish a wide range of anarchist materials."

• Pamphlets
• Writings

• An Introduction to the politics and practice of the Workers Solidarity Federation
• The accumulated Position papers of the WSF. These documents are the fruit of the collective experiences and ideas of the WSF militants. They constitute an important and significant effort in the quest to evolve a particularly African anarchism, with a program and analysis which spring from their implantation among the African masses.
• The Statement to the international anarchist movement on the dissolution of the WSF setting out the organisational reasons for the federations sad demise
• The production of Articles, leaflets and pamphlets in zulu saw anarchist ideas distributed in that language for perhaps the first time ever.