At a Glance
Ventersdorp to Lovedale: The Making of a Communist
John Beaver Marks was born in 1903 in Ventersdorp — a small Boer farming town in the western Transvaal, an unlikely birthplace for one of the most important figures of the South African left. His parentage was mixed — a white Afrikaner father, a Black Tswana mother — and his existence was itself a refutation of the racial categories that South African law was in the process of constructing and enforcing. The racial classification system that would eventually place him in the "Coloured" category was not primarily a description of biological reality; it was a mechanism of social control, and JB Marks's life was lived in conscious opposition to what that control implied.
He was educated at Lovedale College in the Eastern Cape — the mission school that educated a generation of African political and intellectual leaders, including many who became significant figures in the ANC and in the broader cultural and intellectual life of the liberation movement. Lovedale provided its students with an education that was simultaneously an exposure to the Western intellectual tradition and a formation in the particular conditions of African life under colonialism and segregation. For many Lovedale graduates, including Marks, the experience of that education — of being given the analytical tools to understand the system that governed their lives — was the foundation of their political consciousness.
He joined the Communist Party of South Africa in the 1920s — an act that, in the context of the South African left of that decade, was an expression of the most principled political position available. The CPSA was the only significant political organisation in South Africa that operated on a non-racial basis and that organised across the colour line, and its analysis of South African capitalism as a system built on the exploitation of racially categorised labour was, Marks believed, the most accurate account of what South Africa was and what dismantling it would require. He remained a communist for the rest of his life — through the banning of the CPSA in 1950, through the formation of the underground SACP, through the years of exile in Moscow — and his communism was not a young man's phase but a mature, intellectually grounded, and politically consequential commitment.
Building the African Mine Workers Union
The formation of the African Mine Workers Union in 1941 was one of the most ambitious organisational undertakings of the South African left in the wartime period. The gold mines of the Witwatersrand employed hundreds of thousands of Black workers — men recruited through the labour migration system from across southern Africa, housed in compound hostels, paid wages that bore no relationship to the value of what they produced, and denied the legal protections that the industrial relations system extended to white workers. Organising these workers was technically illegal — the War Measure 145 of 1942 prohibited strikes by African workers — and organisationally formidable, given the compound system's design as an instrument of labour control.
JB Marks, as the AMWU's president, approached the task with the combination of political analysis and practical organising skill that characterised the best of the South African communist tradition. He understood that organising the mine workers was not simply an industrial project but a political one — that the conditions in the mines were a concentrated expression of the broader system of racial capitalism, and that building a union capable of challenging those conditions was a contribution to the liberation movement as well as to the labour movement. The AMWU that he built was not a simple wage-bargaining organisation; it was a political education in collective power for men who had been systematically denied both the experience and the consciousness of collective strength.
The union's growth was remarkable given the conditions it faced. By the mid-1940s the AMWU had tens of thousands of members, a network of shop stewards operating inside the compound system, and the organisational capacity to plan and execute the mass action that the 1946 strike would demonstrate. Building that capacity required years of patient work in the face of employer hostility, police surveillance, and the legal framework that denied African workers the right to strike. It was the kind of unglamorous, sustained, dangerous organisational work that the liberation movement depended on but that the historical record tends to undervalue in favour of the dramatic confrontations it eventually made possible.
August 1946: Seventy Thousand Miners and the State's Response
The African mineworkers' strike of August 1946 began on 12 August and involved, at its peak, more than seventy thousand workers across the Witwatersrand goldfields. The workers' central demand was a minimum wage of ten shillings a day — a modest claim for a basic living wage from men who were producing the gold that sustained the South African economy and whose labour was the foundation of the industrial prosperity that white South Africa enjoyed. The demand was also, in the political context of 1946, a challenge to the foundational premise of the migrant labour system: that Black workers were not people with the same needs and the same rights as white workers, but a commodity whose price was set by the mining houses and enforced by the state.
The government's response was unambiguous. The police were deployed at the mines, going underground in some cases to drive workers back to the rock face at bayonet point. Workers who refused to return were beaten. Strikers were arrested in large numbers. The leadership of the AMWU, including Marks, was prosecuted under the War Measure that prohibited African strikes — a prosecution that destroyed the union as a functioning organisation even though most of the accused were eventually acquitted. The strike was broken within a week.
The material outcome was a defeat. The workers returned to the mines without their wage demands having been met, the union was effectively destroyed, and the government demonstrated that it was willing to use whatever force was necessary to maintain the labour relations system on which the mining industry depended. But the political significance of the strike extended far beyond its immediate outcome. It demonstrated, to everyone who was paying attention, that the organisation of Black labour on the goldfields was possible — that men living in compound hostels under conditions of near-total institutional control could be brought to collective action on a scale that shook the mining industry and compelled the state to resort to bayonets to restore order.
The young Nelson Mandela was among those who observed the strike closely and drew lessons from it. His account in Long Walk to Freedom of the strike's impact on his political thinking — of how the crushing of seventy thousand workers' demands for a ten-shilling minimum wage clarified for him what the ANC was up against and what would be required to defeat it — is one of the clearest statements in the liberation movement's literature of the relationship between the labour struggle and the political struggle.
The ANC and the Transvaal: Building the Congress Alliance
JB Marks's role in the ANC was inseparable from his role in the Communist Party — not because the two organisations were identical, but because his political analysis and his organisational practice expressed the same fundamental commitments in both contexts. As chairman of the ANC in the Transvaal, he was a senior figure in the organisation at the moment when the ANC Youth League — led by Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo, and Walter Sisulu — was challenging the conservative leadership of the ANC's older generation and pushing the organisation toward the Programme of Action that it adopted in 1949.
Marks was part of the alliance within the ANC between the communist-aligned members and the Youth League militants — an alliance that, despite the ideological differences between the two currents, shared a commitment to mass action, non-racialism, and the full liberation of the African people. He was one of the figures who helped bridge the tension between the CPSA's class-based analysis and the ANC Youth League's Africanist nationalism, arguing consistently that the two frameworks were complementary rather than contradictory — that the national liberation of the African people and the economic transformation of racial capitalism were not separate goals but two aspects of a single project.
The Congress Alliance that produced the Freedom Charter in 1955 was in significant part the institutional expression of this argument. The alliance brought together the ANC, the Indian congresses, the Congress of Democrats (the white organisation), and the Coloured People's Congress in a multi-racial coalition committed to a non-racial democratic South Africa. JB Marks was one of the architects of this alliance — one of the people who had argued, through decades of Party work and ANC organising, that the liberation movement needed to be as broad and as inclusive as the society it was trying to create.
Banning, Restriction, and the Decision for Exile
The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 had listed JB Marks as a communist and subjected him to the restrictions that listing entailed — restrictions on his ability to attend meetings, to speak publicly, to be quoted in publications, to communicate with other banned persons. The practical effect of these restrictions was to remove him from the public political life of the ANC and the labour movement, to make him legally invisible in the spaces where he had previously been most effective.
He continued to work within the constraints of the banning orders for more than a decade, finding ways to maintain his connections to the movement and to contribute to its work within the limits that the law imposed. But the trajectory of the apartheid state's repression — the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, the banning of the ANC, the state of emergency, the Rivonia arrests and the systematic destruction of the underground networks — made it increasingly clear that effective political work inside South Africa was becoming impossible for the movement's most prominent leaders.
He went into exile in 1962, following the path that many senior ANC and SACP figures took in the early 1960s as it became clear that continued presence in South Africa meant either imprisonment or the complete neutralisation of any political capacity. He went first to other parts of Africa, eventually making his way to the Soviet Union, which provided institutional support and a base of operations for many SACP figures in exile. Moscow became his home for the last decade of his life — a comfortable exile in material terms, but an exile nonetheless, lived at a great distance from the country and the people for whom he had worked for four decades.
Moscow, the SACP, and the Long Distance of Exile
The experience of exile in the Soviet Union was shared by a number of senior SACP figures — Moses Kotane, the SACP's general secretary, was another who spent his last years in Moscow — and it reflected the particular relationship between the South African communist movement and the Soviet Union that the SACP had maintained since its founding. The Soviet Union provided financial support, military training, and political solidarity to the ANC and SACP in exile, and many of the movement's cadres received their political and military education in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries.
JB Marks continued to work for the SACP and the ANC from Moscow — attending meetings, contributing to publications, maintaining the connections to the movement in South Africa and in the ANC's external mission that gave the exile community its organisational coherence. But the distance from South Africa was real, and the ability to contribute effectively to a struggle that was being conducted thousands of miles away was necessarily limited. He died in Moscow on 2 August 1972, at the age of sixty-nine, without having returned to South Africa.
His death in Moscow, like the deaths of Moses Kotane and Yusuf Dadoo in exile, was the particular tragedy of the South African liberation movement's generation of communist leaders — people who had committed their lives to the freedom of a country they were forced to leave and could not return to, who died at a distance from the people they had organised and the places they had lived in, sustained by the conviction that the struggle would eventually succeed even if they did not live to see it.
Legacy: The Strike That Shaped a Movement's Political Memory
JB Marks's most enduring legacy is the 1946 mineworkers' strike — not because the strike succeeded, which it did not, but because of what it demonstrated and what it taught the generation of ANC leaders who observed it. The 1946 strike showed that the organisation of Black labour on the goldfields was possible and that the state would use violence to prevent it from achieving its goals. Both lessons were important.
The demonstration of possibility — that seventy thousand workers in mine compounds could be brought to collective action — was the foundation on which the National Union of Mineworkers built its remarkable growth in the 1980s. James Motlatsi and Cyril Ramaphosa, building the NUM four decades after the AMWU's destruction, were inheritors of the organisational tradition that Marks had helped establish. The argument that Black mineworkers could be organised, that their collective power was real, that the mining houses' labour regime was not immovable — this argument was proved in 1946, even in defeat, and it remained available to those who came after.
The demonstration of the state's willingness to use violence — to send police underground with bayonets to drive workers back to the rock face — was equally important. It clarified, for Mandela and Sisulu and Tambo and the other young ANC leaders of the late 1940s, what kind of state they were dealing with and what strategies were adequate to the challenge of dismantling it. The 1946 strike was part of the political education that produced the Programme of Action of 1949, the Defiance Campaign of 1952, and eventually the turn to armed struggle in 1961. JB Marks's contribution to the liberation movement was not only what he built but what he demonstrated — and what he demonstrated in 1946 shaped South African political history for decades.