Fighting Apartheid

Alexander was born in Cradock in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 1936. His father was David James Alexander, a carpenter, and his mother, Dimbiti Bisho Alexander, was a schoolteacher. Her mother was among a group of Ethiopian slaves who had been freed and placed in the care of missionaries in Cradock. Alexander went to a local school run by German nuns.

In 1953, he moved to Cape Town to take a degree in history and German at the University of Cape Town. There, he was influenced by (and later joined) the Teachers’ League of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, a group that was inspired by Trotskyist ideas. He also helped found the Cape Peninsula Students Union and belonged to the Society of Young Africa with figures like Archie Mafeje.

A fellowship sent him to Germany’s University of Tübingen, where he obtained a doctorate at the age of twenty-six. His stay in Germany lasted from October 1958 to July 1961. During this period, he joined the Socialist German Students’ League and was closely associated with Algerian and Cuban students who were active in their liberation struggles.

Alexander also became involved in the German metalworkers’ union, supporting Italian migrant workers. As he later recalled, he addressed rallies and distributed leaflets aimed at workers at the gates of industrial plants, including the Mercedes factories in the vicinity of Stuttgart.

His return to South Africa in 1961 came soon after the Sharpeville Massacre in March of the previous year. Together with others, he saw the need for armed struggle against the apartheid regime in the wake of Sharpeville. With Namibian and South African activists, he helped establish the National Liberation Front (NLF). Its members included the late judge Fikile Bam and Dulcie September, who became the ANC representative in France, where she was assassinated in 1988.

In July 1963, he was arrested with ten other members of the NLF (six men and four women), all of whom were in their twenties. After a lengthy trial, they received sentences between five and ten years. Alexander was imprisoned for ten years from 1964 to 1974 in the isolation section of Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela and others.

After his release from prison, he was placed under a banning order, a form of house arrest, for five years. In 1977, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) leader, Steve Biko, attempted to meet clandestinely with Alexander in Cape Town to discuss arrangements for bringing together all the liberation movements, including their armed formations. This decision was already made by the BCM and the NLF. Biko and Alexander were meant to travel overseas to meet the exiled leadership of the liberation organizations.

However, Alexander did not meet Biko. They were both under surveillance and Alexander’s organization felt that the unscheduled visit by Biko was too risky and premature. Biko was arrested on his way back to the Eastern Cape at a random police checkpoint: he was recognized and later killed in prison. Alexander later regarded this missed encounter with Biko as “one of the most tragic moments” in his life.

Limitations of Nationalism

After the election of the ANC-led government in 1994, many of Alexander’s prescient ideas about the limitations of nationalism came to have an even greater meaning in the struggle for liberation. This was especially true for the most socially marginalized working-class communities, both urban and rural.

Alexander’s orientation to the post-apartheid government extended the ideas of African revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral who had similar misgivings about the rise of a comprador national elite elsewhere in Africa. Alexander opposed the post-apartheid state’s acceptance of the ideology of neoliberalism, pointing to its pernicious effects on the poor.

Not content with putting forward a critique, he sought through his ideas and practices to demonstrate the possibilities for the organization of an alternative anti-capitalist society. Alexander developed a body of writings spanning issues in political and social philosophy, education and culture, history, and ethical life, all of which prefigured such an alternative society and the strategies and practices necessary for their realization.

One of his most important intellectual contributions was a set of ideas about racial capitalism, a term that he first used in a 1983 speech to illuminate the relationship between capitalism and apartheid in South Africa. He had formulated these ideas as a direct result of the difficult debates he had with his fellow prisoners on Robben Island, especially the leaders of the ANC, Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu.

These debates clarified his misgivings about the path that the ANC was likely to take in the post-apartheid period. Such misgivings led him to clandestinely produce his seminal volume, One Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa, which he published in 1979 under the nom de guerre No Sizwe.

Alexander’s arguments and conceptualizations were always aimed at strengthening the struggle against the oppressive and exploitative racial capitalist regime. He abjured liberal conceptions of democracy whose effect, he believed, was to maintain and strengthen the fundamental elements of racial capitalism, as evidenced in the form assumed by the post-apartheid state.

In his 1985 book, Sow the Wind, this was how Alexander viewed his contribution to the struggle for national liberation:

The abiding focus of my own contribution is on subjects such as the link between racism and capitalism; the need for and the inevitability of socialist solutions to our problems hence the crucial need to ensure working-class leadership of our struggle; the importance of nation-building in order to eliminate ethnic and racial prejudice; the link between women’s liberation, national liberation and class emancipation; the vital need to initiate and to sustain educational and cultural practices today that will systematically and inexorably undermine and counter the divisive and exploitative practices that derive from the pursuit of the interests of the dominating classes in an apartheid society.

Predictably, his political practice and his writings were also the subject of contestation, since his thinking represented a strongly socialist perspective — one that was irreconcilable with certain strands in the liberation movement that favored a combination of liberal and nationalist perspectives.

Racial Mystifications

Alexander took a long view of history, and this fueled his consistent optimism. He was concerned to refute what he termed the “propagation of bogus nationalisms, the main purpose of which is to dissipate the force of the class struggle by deflecting it into channels that will nurture the dominant classes.”

Because social relations were mystified in the form of “race relations,” he insisted, there was a need to “illuminate the character of the real (socioeconomic) basis of inequality and the real (ideological) forms in which it is expressed,” in pursuit of a genuine liberation and the demise of apartheid capitalism.

For Alexander, although racism is all too real, “race” as a biological concept is not. While he deemed it important to lay bare the “nonsense of race,” Alexander did not see this as an end in itself. Such clarification was as much a question of how the political struggle was to be prosecuted as it was a matter of deconstructing racist ideas.

For Alexander, the obfuscatory ideas he criticized had profound implications for the strategies to be adopted against the apartheid regime. In this spirit, he challenged forms of racial organization predicated on the idea that race itself was a real phenomenon. In his view, this approach capitulated to a social construct whose effects were pernicious and contradictory in relation to any serious conception of nationhood or “national consciousness.”

In 1983, Alexander delivered an address with the title “Nation and Ethnicity in South Africa” to the National Forum meeting in Hammanskraal, a town near South Africa’s administrative capital Pretoria. Spurred by a call from Black Consciousness activists, the National Forum brought together some two hundred organizations and six hundred delegates, most of whom were to the left of the ANC and saw its Freedom Charter as a compromised, liberal document.

At the end of the conference, delegates unanimously adopted the “Manifesto of the Azanian People,” which drew its opening sentences from Alexander’s talk. As he put it:

The immediate goal of the national liberation struggle now being waged in South Africa is the destruction of the system of racial capitalism. Apartheid is simply a particular socio-political expression of this system. Our opposition to apartheid is therefore only a starting point for our struggle against the structures and interests which are the real basis of apartheid.

Alexander’s analysis of racial capitalism in South Africa focused on three interrelated dynamics: racialized dispossession, racial exploitation, and racialized job reservations. He insisted that accumulation by racialized dispossession was not limited to the precapitalist era but was in fact an ongoing, structural feature of the way capitalism functioned in South Africa due to laws that “sanctified the original conquest” and facilitated further displacement and dispossession.

As the South African system entered into crisis, with massive, continuous protests and worker-led campaigns against the regime together with the disinvestment strategies of the global anti-apartheid movement leading to declining profits and rising unemployment, Alexander warned that “the present system will not be able to employ all our employable people, pay them a living wage, make it possible for them to live in decent adequate houses at prices they can afford, [or] give their children free and compulsory education.”

One Great River

Alexander was the leading proponent of a set of emancipatory ideas about language. Those ideas grew from his earliest interactions as a child in both formal and informal settings and developed further while he was incarcerated on Robben Island. As a socialist internationalist, Alexander remained open to the construction of a universal identity that would not be constrained by national boundaries, while at the same time recognizing the variety of social orientations and identities to which human beings are given, provided these do not infringe upon the claims of a common humanity.

For Alexander, language and its cultural implications were profoundly important for the constitution of historical subjects. If understood properly, the study of language could play a useful role in bringing a priori constructions of culture and identity into question. This would make it possible to counter ethnic identities while promoting national consciousness, taking account of South Africa’s rich cultural diversity.

He put forward a metaphor about the confluence of different tributaries of a wide river that was intended to deny any culture privileged status. Alexander accepted that South Africa represented a combination of African, European, Asian, and (more recently) modern American cultures, which influenced each other in every domain of social life, from sports and music to religion. These tributaries themselves eventually flowed into the ocean of humanity.

The corollary of this observation was the need to use fluid rather than static concepts of culture that depended on specific cultural practices, traditions, and customs. Language was thus not merely a reflection of social reality. It also helped constitute that reality and could play a transformative role.

Alexander’s life and work is instructive for our own time as we face the “polycrisis” generated by corporate capitalism and the reemergence of the fascist blight. Alexander would have urged us to understand this crisis by analyzing the complex relationships between history, culture, language, ideology, and the material conditions, both economic and environmental, under which the great majority of humanity is forced to live.

He would also have pointed to the inevitability of struggle against those conditions and the importance of finding the premises, analytical and organizational, for resisting the many forms of exploitative oppression and the ecological catastrophe facing all humanity. Alexander’s critical interventions are profoundly important for sustaining the fight against rapacious and uncaring political and social systems.