Remembering Michael Harmel, one of South Africa's great progressive theorists

In the month of January 2025, I am reminded of a passing reference in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, to a great South African who we have long forgotten.

Recalling his ANC underground days in his safe house on Liliesleaf Farm before his arrest in 1962, Mandela wrote: “After Raymond [Mhlaba] left, I was joined for a brief time by Michael Harmel, a key figure in the underground Communist Party, a founding member of the Congress of Democrats, and an editor of the magazine Liberation. Michael was a brilliant theorist and was working on policy matters for the Communist Party, and needed a quiet and safe place to work on this full time.”  

We hardly hear any mention of Michael Harmel these days. He was awarded the Order of Luthuli posthumously, and that’s about it. I have chosen to pay tribute to him as he was born in February 1915, 110 years ago next month.

More importantly, he may be gone in person and disappeared from our memory, but his legacy is still with us in the debate we have today about the Tripartite Alliance, its future and whether the time has now come for the SACP to sever its historic ties with the ANC to go on its own.  

A remembrance of Harmel enables us to restate three known facts about theories: theories are a human invention, not some holy word to be worshipped by loyal adherents and regurgitated repetitively without questioning; the theory behind theories asserts that humans develop these concepts to make sense of the world around them to change it; and theories have also a history, with a date and place of birth, and bear the name of their inventor.  

The SACP was formed in 1921, but it struggled at the beginning with how to pursue its communist objective in a colonial setting where the leading force for liberation was a nationalist movement in the form of the ANC. It would take the SACP decades and many political purges to establish a strategic partnership with the ANC. 

Therefore, when Harmel was on his covert SACP mission as recounted by Mandela, he was making history, for the draft he produced on Liliesleaf Farm would pivot the SACP in a new direction by providing the long-coveted theoretical basis and an ideological rationale for the SACP-ANC alliance.

This document is the seminal “Road to South African Freedom”, adopted as policy by the SACP in 1962. At the heart of it was the concept of Colonialism of a Special Type (CST), reputedly developed by Harmel himself, which described apartheid South Africa as an atypical colonial question as the coloniser and the colonised resided within the same geographic boundaries.

So, flowing from this analysis, the immediate goal of the liberation effort should be to overthrow the CST in an all-inclusive, multiclass struggle led by the ANC to establish a national democratic order. And once this new order is in place, the Struggle shifts to the second gear, to pursue the working class objective of building a communist society.

The CST and its two stages have remained intact as the cornerstone of SACP ideology ever since they were penned by Harmel. The current debate arises because the SACP is of the view that the push to the second stage should begin in earnest, and the ANC is not playing ball.

This is understandable because the ANC has also evolved ideologically. For a period spanning close to six decades, from its origin in 1912 to the exile period in the 1960s, the ANC confined its ideological orientation to the contours of African nationalism, its membership narrowly limited to black Africans, and its goal modestly about fighting racism and defeating colonialism to establish a national democratic state.

Transcontinental connections of the early generation of ANC leaders are well known – their formative days as students at British and American academic institutions, and how they were intellectually inspired by key African-American figures like W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, with whom they maintained personal and political contacts for years.  

The ANC underwent a significant transformation from the 1940s into 1960s in five ways: growing into a mass movement; the adoption of the Armed Struggle; embracing non-racialism; integrating Marxist class analysis into its African nationalism; and adapting to executing its Liberation Struggle remotely from exile. Non-racialism and forging a class analysis-inspired alliance with the SACP were among the most difficult of the five transformations.  

The ideological portrait of the ANC, pre- and in exile, is in two different shades.

The Morogoro Conference of 1969 is where a refashioned ANC formally emerged. The “Strategy and Tactics” document that this conference adopted became the blueprint of the new ANC in exile, that is non-racialism, and that now talks class analysis and the National Democratic Revolution in its ideological language.

This “Strategy and Tactics” was to the ANC what the “Road to South African Freedom” was to the SACP. It is in these two documents where the meeting of minds between the two organisations was achieved, and Harmel was the chief architect.

In its “Strategy and Tactics”, the ANC of Morogoro renounced its foundation ideology which it now dismissed as “narrow nationalism”, implicitly accepted the SACP’s two-stage thesis, and explicitly embraced the view being promoted then by the likes of Harmel that socialism was gaining ground globally and inevitably destined to be the dominant system worldwide. 

If the SACP socialised the ANC to class analysis, the ANC on its part rescued the SACP from the limitations of classical Marxism by helping it appreciate better the centrality of racial oppression in the South African Struggle.

The “Road to South African Freedom” saved the SACP from political oblivion and, in turn, also transformed the ANC into a better, ideologically more sophisticated and more effective liberation movement.  

What we know as the Alliance is a phenomenon that is 78 years old. But it meant something different to Harmel as he was absorbed in his writing assignment on Liliesleaf Farm. Its forerunner was the Joint Declaration of Cooperation, the “Doctors’ Pact” signed on 9 March 1947 by the presidents of the ANC, Natal Indian Congress and Transvaal Indian Congress. 

In the 1950s, the Alliance evolved from being a cooperation arrangement of the three organisations of the oppressed to a broad, non-racial political front - the famous Congress Alliance that gave our nation the Freedom Charter. 

The Freedom Charter was, of course, a popularly generated document, but its actual drafter was Harmel’s SACP fellow traveller – the late Rusty Bernstein, who explained in a private letter he wrote to me several years ago that “as for the writing of the Freedom Charter, I was given the job of writing it by gathering together all the hundreds of individual demands sent in from all over the country, and creating a single document out of them. If that is what you mean by ‘writing’ the Charter, then I wrote it. I prefer to say that I ‘crafted’ it – that is to say, the ideas in it were my summation of the ideas of many other people. Only the words are mine.” 

In exile, circumstance of history trimmed down the church-size Congress Alliance. Its constituent components changed to the trio – the ANC, SACP and the South African Congress of Trade Unions. The latter was folded after the unbanning in 1990 and replaced by Cosatu. Therefore, our Tripartite Alliance of today is a recent creation that is as young as our democracy.

The base assumption that was embedded in the two-stage concept has experienced a significant setback globally. While colonialism has been defeated throughout the world, the expected transition to a socialist system at the global level has been elusive. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the trend has instead been in the opposite direction.

In South Africa, the ANC doesn’t seem to have an appetite for socialism as it did back then at Morogoro. To regain the appeal the SACP’s two stages used to enjoy in the ranks of the ANC, will be a tall order. Six questions appear pertinent to me. 

First, because clearly the ANC has lost interest in the second stage, must the SACP take the lead, pull together like-minded forces and take over the country? For this to happen, the SACP must be ready to take on the ANC and replace it to establish itself as a new hegemonic force.  

Second, the qualitative leap to the second stage: How must it happen - through another revolution, an insurrection or through a protracted series of reforms? Or through an electoral path where the SACP wins an electoral majority based on its manifesto? 

Third, who are the motive forces for this transition? The workers? Intellectuals? The youth? Are they out there, mobilised and organised, and do they have the requisite capacity and presence in society to play this expected role? Above all, are they interested in waging the struggle for the second phase in the same way we were in the fight against apartheid? 

Fourth, the second stage will be a qualitatively new stage, with its own constitution, institutions, law enforcement agencies and the army. How do we effect this constitutional revolution? Through a referendum? And will the SACP prevail in such a referendum? Or should the socialist order be imposed by force? 

Fifth, in a socialist state, private property is abolished and the state takes over the means of production. What will be the fate of the means of production acquired post-1994 by black people like our incumbent president and the likes of Patrice Motsepe? Will the state dispossess our billionaire comrades (whose number include former SACP and Cosatu leaders) of their newly acquired wealth?  

Finally, and a much bigger question that is at the heart of the communist project, is the notion of “the withering away of the state”. The state in Marxist thinking is the instrument of class oppression in the hands of the dominant class. Therefore, in the advanced stage of communism, of a classless society, it becomes unnecessary and eventually disappears. What will happen in our case? How do we envisage this advanced stage unfolding in our country? When? In this century?  

Things were much clearer to Harmel as he was going about his writing routine in his hideout to execute his SACP task. He, Mandela and other leaders of the Congress Alliance were still battle-scarred, fresh from the mass campaigns of the 1950s, and were now on Liliesleaf Farm, diligently preparing for the new phase of Armed Struggle. Out there in the world, the Soviet Union posed a serious challenge to the capitalist system and stood tall in Harmel’s mind as a viable alternative.  

Today, things are no longer that clear. Our view of the world out there is hazy. Our post-apartheid dispensation has become more complex than any of us had anticipated.

One thing for sure though is that Harmel’s curious mind would be bothered by the six questions posed above. I can imagine him digging his brain deep into another assignment: to write a sequel to the document that kept him occupied on Liliesleaf Farm. He would not rest until he found his socialist road to South African freedom.  

Every epoch has its own intellectuals. Harmel did not fail his generation as he ably rose to the challenges of his time, thanks to his sharp intellect.

Jacob Dlamini writes in a journal article about how Govan Mbeki, himself an intellectual heavyweight, humbled himself in his interview with his biographer, the historian Colin Bundy: “While Mbeki was prolific as an activist-journalist, he was not a theorist. As Mbeki himself told Bundy: ‘No, no, Michael Harmel, he was a theorist. Not me’.” DM