How the failed ideals of 1970s activists haunt post-apartheid SA

Ian Macqueen, The Mail & Guardian

South Africa is in many ways a very different country to that envisaged by political activists of the 1970s. For one, the equitable society they anticipated would replace apartheid remains a chimera. Instead, a process has taken place that political geographer Gillian Hart calls the “denationalisation” and “renationlisation” of the economy under the African National Congress (ANC).

'Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner' - A review

Keniston, B., 2013, Choosing to be Free: The Life Story of Rick Turner. Johannesburg. Jacana (276pp.; R220)

Reviewed by Richard Pithouse, Interface

Rick Turner, a philosopher and a committed and effective radical, was assassinated in Durban, South Africa, in January 1978. Turner had, along with Steve Biko who was murdered in police custody in September 1977, been a leading figure in what came to be known as ‘the Durban Moment’. The phrase, which was first coined by Tony Morphet (1990), refers to a period in the early 1970s in which Durban became a site of significant political innovation in the struggle against apartheid, innovation that was conceptualised and organised outside of the strictures of the exiled African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party (SACP). Morphet argued that ‘the Durban Moment’ enabled a “structural shift in the received intellectual patterns of the social world” (1990, pp. 92-3). It also had enduring political consequences of real significance (Macqueen, 2014; Webster, 1993).

'The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s' - A review

Glen Moss, The New Radicals: A Generational Memoir of the 1970s, Jacana, Johannesburg, 2014

Reviewed by: Benjamin Fogel, Journal of Asian & African Studies

The New Radicals is a generational memoir, or rather a political memoir of a generation of white South African student radicals that came of age in the early 1970s through the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This generation formed a key part of the emerging movements that awakened South Africa from the political slumber of the 1960s. As Glenn Moss puts it, his book “records how they (a group of students) moved from the relatively liberal protest and symbolic politics of an elite university to help in creating the preconditions for a radical challenge to the society that had formed them” (p.vii).

Eddie Webster reviews 'Billy Keniston (2013) Choosing to be Free: the life story of Rick Turner'

Eddie Webster reviews 'Billy Keniston (2013) Choosing to be Free: the life story of Rick Turner' by TigersEye99

Dangerous mind: What Rick Turner still has to offer free South Africa

Four months after Steve Biko was beaten to death in police custody in 1977, fellow activist, academic and philosopher, Rick Turner, was assassinated in his Durban home. Both men offered South Africans – black and white – transformative new ways of thinking about and framing themselves and society. Their ideas were such a threat that authorities at the time tried to wipe both men off the face of the earth. MARIANNE THAMM revisits Turner’s legacy and what it might offer contemporary South Africa. The Daily Maverick

Remembering Heroes on the ‘Fringe’: Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Neil Aggett

Remebering Heroes on the Fringe - Anthony Egan reviews new books on Rick Turner & Niel Aggett by TigersEye99

Conference Programme: The Durban Moment - Revisiting Politics, Labour, Youth and Resistance in the 1970s

Rhodes University  21–23 February 2013

Thursday 21st February	Venue: Centre for Continuing Education
First Session
9.00 – 9.30	Registration
9.30 – 9.45	Welcome by Professor Saleem Badat, Vice Rector
9.45 – 10.00	Welcome and announcements by Omar Badsha
10.00 – 11.30	The Meaning of the Durban Moment Now
	Richard Pithouse: The Meaning of the Durban Moment Now
11.30 – 11.45	Tea

The Durban Strikes 1973 ("Human Beings with Souls")

In January 1973 South Africa witnessed a momentous chain of events in its political history. The Durban Strikes were a turning point in the confrontation between the country's minority rulers and the worker majority. Motivated by material need and underpinned by principles of democracy and equality, the strikes conjoined academics, workers and political leaders among others, in a struggle that was to redefine the South African political landscape in the years to follow.

Richard Turner's Contribution to a Socialist Political Culture in South Africa 1968 - 1978

William Keniston, MA Thesis, 2010

Richard Turner, a banned political science lecturer from the University of Natal, was assassinated on the 8th of January, 1978. In the ten years preceding, Turner had been actively involved in a wide range of activities radically opposed to apartheid and capitalism. Turner was a remarkable professor, who taught his students more through questioning and dialogue than lecture. Turner had a significant impact on left wing white students. He played an important role in encouraging white activists to understand Black Consciousness as a radical politics to be embraced, rather than shunned. Turner encouraged whites to find a role for themselves within a struggle that he saw as driven by Black demands and programmes. In addition, Turner was involved in the emerging trade union movement, following the wildcat strikes in 1973. He participated in creating the Institute for Industrial Education, which had a curriculum focused on increasing class consciousness amongst workers building democratic trade unions.

The Durban Moment: Revisiting politics, labour & resistance in the 1970s

Reconstruction or Transformation

by Ari Sitas, The 1995 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, Republished in Theoria

Click here to download this file in pdf.

Re-imagining South Africa: Black Consciousness, radical Christianity and the New Left, 1967 – 1977

by Ian Macqueen, PhD Thesis, 2011

This thesis places Black Consciousness in comparative perspective with progressive politics in South Africa in the late 1960s and the 1970s. It argues that the dominant scholarly focus on Black Consciousness, which is passed over as a ‘stage’ in the Black struggle against white supremacy, insufficiently historicises the deeper roots, and the wider resonances and ideological contestations of the Black Consciousness movement. As they refined their political discourse, Black Consciousness activists negotiated their way through the progressive ideologies that flourished as part of the wider political and social ferment of the 1960s. Although Black Consciousness won over an influential minority of radical Christians, a more contested struggle took place with nascent feminism on university campuses and within the Movement; as well as with a New Left-inspired historical and political critique that gained influence among white activists.

The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa

The Eye of the Needle by Richard Turner

Tony Morphet's biographical introduction is online here.

The full text of this book is online here.

The Eye of the Needle marks a particular moment in the political and cultural history of South Africa and more precisely in the history of the opposition to white supremacist rule in South Africa. It also marks a moment in the biography of Richard Turner.

Nothing quite like The Eye of the Needle had (or has since) appeared in South Africa. Perhaps most startling of all are the assumptions which are visible throughout the book....that this society, complex and cruel thought it is, rests finally on nothing more than men's choices and therefore, for that same reason, it can be changed. Most South African writing, both its fiction and polemic, assumes a powerful objective dominance in the social structure - men may protest and bewail their fate but little or nothing can be done to effect any change. Turner's writing breathes a different spirit. Men have made the society in a way that can be completely comprehended, and in the same way men can change the society.

Richard Turner and the Politics of Emancipation

by Duncan Greaves, 1987

Richard Turner died in the early hours of January 8, 1978; he was gunned down, at the age of 37, by an assailant who has yet to be identified. In the decade since then political violence in South Africa has escalated to the point where we now stand on the brink of civil war. Or perhaps I should say anti-political violence; for there is a sharp limit to which the purposes of politics and violence can be reconciled. There is, to be sure, an intimate and complex link between the two; it has often been suggested that war is the prosecution of diplomacy by other means, and, by a logical extension, that civil war is the prosecution of politics by other means. But the link is one of tension, for the one does not simply translate into the other as the need arises. Instead, we typically find that violence tends to drown politics in its own purposes.

Moral Decay and Social Reconstruction Richard Turner and Radical Reform

by Eddie Webster, Theoria, 1993

In 1972 Richard Turner published a remarkable book, The Eye of the Needle: Towards Participatory Democracy in South Africa. In this wok he stressed the capacity of people to change the world in which they lived while at the same time providing them with a vision of a future South Africa based on participatory democracy . Most importantly, Turner placed heavy emphasis on the significance of black workers in the economy . He believed that it was through collective organization, especially trade unions, that black people could exercise some control over their lives and influence the direction of change in South Africa.

The Relevance of Contemporary Radical Thought

by Richard Turner, SPRO-CAS, 1971

THE OBJECT of this paper is to discuss the relevance of 'contemporary radical thought' to the South African situation. The phrase 'contemporary radical thought' includes the ideologies of various issue-orientated struggles such as 'Student Power', 'Black Power' and 'Women's Liberation' groups, and also refers to recent developments in Marxist theory and in Christian thought. In political terms it finds expression in a number of parties situated well to the left of the orthodox Communist parties in the political spectrum.

Dialectical Reason

by Richard Turner, Radical Philosophy, 1973

The concept 'dialectical reason', as used by 'marxist' theorists, contains buried within it a number of theoretical problems, problems which have significance for where why and how we may use dialectical reason. There are three issues, in particular, on which reflective clarity is both always needed and often lacking. Firstly, what precisely distinguishes 'dialectical reason' from 'analytical reason'? Secondly, how does one legitimise the use of dialectical reason - that is, are there 'laws' of dialectical reason, how are they discovered, and to what may they be applied? Thirdly, given that the central concept of dialectics is that of 'totality', and that it is therefore assumed that the observer is always part of the totality being observed, how, if at all, does one escape from historical relativism?

Re-reading Rick Turner in the New South Africa

Tony Fluxman and Peter Vale, 2004

Using the writings of the assassinated South African political philosopher Rick Turner, this article provides a critique of South Africa ten years after the end of apartheid. Influenced by both Western Marxism and utopian thinking, Turner developed a model of democratic socialism which offered a vision of a ‘new South Africa’. This was countered by the ideology of the market and, later, by the force of the ‘end of history’ thesis. The article argues that inequalities continue in South Africa because the promise of Western Marxism was squeezed out by the convergence of communist political ideology and capitalist modernization.

'Brushing History Against the Grain': Oppositional Discourse in South Africa

by Tony Morphet, The Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, Durban, 1990

Click here to download this article.

Eddie Webster, the Durban moment and new labour internationalism

by Rob Lambert, Transformation, 2010

An alternative to neo-liberal globalisation

The struggle for an alternative to self-regulating global capitalism, commonly described as neo-liberal globalisation, needs to be contested both at the level of ideas (theory/ideology) and strategy (movement/politics). Firstly, a vision of an alternative model of economy, politics and society, grounded in democratic social regulation has to be forged. Harvey refers to this as 'thought experiments'--painting fantastic pictures of a future society (Harvey 2000:49,). Secondly, realising such a vision depends upon imagining and struggling for a new kind of global social movement, which creates active, globally coordinated civil societies, driven by the desire for a more humane, just way of working and living. Defining the role of unions within such a movement is contested, with some arguing that unions have become an obstacle to the realisation of such a movement (Waterman 2009).