Political strategies and the law in South Africa: analytical considerations

Abstract

It is a commonplace that statutory law has been, and continues to be, a major mechanism in the structuring of the racial domination of the various black classes in South Africa. For this reason, oppositional political movements have had continuously to confront the law and to pose questions about political strategies towards legislation and its implementation. Political and trade union organisations have deployed two types of strategies and in both, generally, the entire racial legal edifice has been, at least implicitly, put into question. One strategy challenges that edifice by the organised disobedience of, or disregard for, one or more statutory enactments. Leaving aside sabotage and armed struggle, there are numerous examples in South African history of organised political campaigns aimed at forcing the regime to retreat through large scale transgressions of the law: these include the anti-pass campaigns of 1960 and earlier years; the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign of 1952; the establishment of schools in defiance of the 1956 Bantu Education Act; the refusal to comply with urban population removal orders under the Western Areas Resettlement Act and with rural relocation under other acts; and unlawful urban squatters movements. In passing, it should be noted that these types of actions must be rigorously differentiated from individual transgressions of the law with which radical criminology, deviance theory and some social history have been pre-occupied. In these accounts, individual criminal and deviant acts are conceived of as inherently political as essentially expressing opposition to the existing system and, therefore, as being revolutionary or at least radical in their connotations. The counterpart of this is to construe every individual recalcitrant act in the work situation as class struggle. In these arguments the ideas of the 'political', and the political class struggle, lose all specificity and are simply dissolved into an amorphous totality of social action. In this paper, by contrast, it is assumed that actions against the law constitute political strategies only when they involve joint and organised action as part of and as an expression of oppositional political discourses.