In memory of Tom Lodge

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa.

2 Lodge, Red Road to Freedom.

3 Macintyre, The Reds; Macintyre, The Party.

4 Johanningsmeier, “Communists and Black Freedom Movements” is a good example of an approach which insists on that the Communist parties were basically autonomous from Soviet and Comintern control.

5 See, for an example of the right-wing historiography, the extensive works of Harvey Klehr, such as Klehr, Haynes and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism. There is a vast leftist literature critical of the subordination of national Communist parties to the Soviet Union: for example, Broué and Témime, Revolution and Civil War; Claudin, The Communist Movement; Mandel, From Stalinism to Eurocommunism. For South Africa, the writings of Eddie Roux both represent both a disaffected Communist’s critique of the Soviet role in the early days of the South African party and are, at the same time, important works of South African literature: Roux, Time Longer Than Rope and Roux, Rebel Pity.

6 Lodge, “Poqo and Rural Resistance”; Lodge, “The Paarl Insurrection”; Lodge, “Insurrectionism in South Africa”. The PAC and Poqo are also extensively dealt with in Lodge, Black Politics.

7 See Kaye, The British Marxist Historians for a useful survey of this intellectual context.

8 Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969) and Lerumo, Fifty Fighting Years are both post-hoc rationalizations of past party policies. It must however be said that the Simons’ book is is well written and contains a great deal of interesting historical research, while ‘Lerumo’ (the pseudonym of party ideologue Michael Harmel) is vague, abstract and almost unreadable. Legassick, Towards Socialist Democracy is the most sophisticated of the far-left critiques of the various ‘lines’ of the South African Communists, including the Native Republic. It is a work of extraordinary erudition and commitment, but is perhaps the locus classicus of the “right line fallacy” for South Africa.

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Jonathan Hyslop

Jonathan Hyslop recently retired as Emeritus Professor of Sociology and African Studies at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. He is also Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. Hyslop worked for many years at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he was Deputy Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER). He has published widely on the social and political history of Southern Africa, on maritime history, and on British Empire history. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2007–2008), and the Re:work project, Humboldt University, Berlin (2015–2016). [email protected].