Drew argues that much of the internal weakness of the CPSA derived from its relationship with the Comintern. South African communists were always vulnerable to external influence, in part because most communists were recent immigrants from Europe with connections to European parties, and in part because South Africa had no socialist tradition of its own. As a result, the Comintern was exceptionally influential in South Africa, particularly in the late 1920s, and the CPSA had difficulty maintaining a steady party line and leadership because the Comintern vacillated among positions almost year by year. As ideological stances fell out of favor, so did the leaders most closely associated with them. Internal rivalries and splits were raised to the level of doctrinal challenges as conflicting sides turned to Moscow to confirm, and legitimate, their position. In a local reflection of the international division, those who fell out of favor were called Trotskyists, regardless of their ideological views. The split between (Stalinist) communists and Trotskyists was mapped onto racial politics in South Africa, as each side aligned with different black opposition groups.

Although the Comintern played such an important role in guiding the party, its ideological directives had little to say about the main problems facing South African communists: how to organize across racial lines when local conditions (racism as well as legal constraints) precluded such organization, and whether African nationalist organizations were legitimate engines of social change. Before 1924, the CPSA focused most of its recruiting efforts on organizing white labor. As the most skilled and stable sector of the working class, whites were expected by some within the party to be the vanguard of an urban proletariat. White workers consistently saw their interests as separate from and even conflicting with those of black workers, however, and refused to align across racial lines to build a unified working class. The CPSA finally turned its attention to black workers in 1924, demonstrating some ability to respond to local conditions and to the growing significance of black labor. In the 1930s and 1940s, party members such as Ray Simons played a crucial role in building a black trade union movement through the painstaking work of organizing on the factory floor. That movement is one of the lasting legacies of the early CPSA.

What stands out most is precisely how small and isolated the CPSA was, considering the important role it later played in South African opposition politics through its influence on the liberation movements. At its peak in 1929, the CPSA had only 3,000 members. By the time it was banned through the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950, it had fewer than 2,000. Yet, many of the positions and rhetorical flourishes made familiar through African National Congress (ANC) discourse turn out to be early socialist positions—from which the much more conservative ANC quickly distanced itself.

The relationship between the South African communists and other oppositional organizations, such as the All African Congress, the anti-Coloured Affairs Department, the ANC, and the Non-European Union Movement, was complicated by “the race question,” which confounded CPSA ideologues and strategists for most of the century. How to handle race in the effort to forge a class struggle was a central problem for South African communists and was a decisive, and indeed divisive, problem between the CPSA and the Comintern. In 1929 Sidney Bunting, an influential South African communist leader, established the League of African Rights. It was meant to be a broadly based organization that included strands of democratic and national liberation as well as communist ideology. The league was growing quickly, particularly in comparison to the tiny ANC, when the Comintern ordered it disbanded.

Drew speculates that if the League of African Rights had survived, it could have offered the basis of a working class or social democratic challenge to the ANC (p. 278) Instead, the CPSA pursued a policy of tactical alliance with the ANC through the 1940s, even as both groups were careful to maintain an independent identity. The ANC considered the CPSA too radical, and the CPSA feared being tainted by ANC nationalism. When the CPSA was banned in 1950, party leaders unilaterally elected to disband completely, to the surprise of many members. The party was reconstituted underground three years later, but it was almost completely subverted within the ANC. Drew ends her account of the South African Left in 1950, perhaps because, “in the era of apartheid and the Cold War, South African socialism subordinated itself to nationalism” (p. 280).

This narrowly constraining perspective unnecessarily pits nationalism and Left as opposing paradigms. In the case of South Africa, as in many others, nationalism was harnessed to the project of the Left after 1953. For example, the 1955 ANC Freedom Charter included such provisions as “the land belongs to all who work on it.” The true legacy of the CPSA was its influence on the ANC, from within, and later also on the United Democratic Front. In the final decade of apartheid, the state was challenged by mass-based people power anchored in the black trade union movement. This also was the Left, speaking simultaneously in the voice of race and class and confounding the oppositions that long structured South African intellectual and academic discourse—is it race or class conflict? It was both, and leftist opposition expanded to occupy all the spaces of domination and marginalization. Today, the CPSA is one of very few communist parties in power anywhere in the world, as part of the Tripartite Alliance with the ANC and Congress of South African Trade Unions. Yet, the alliance with the trade unions and the liberation movement has hardly strengthened the hand of the Left. In the postapartheid era, it has finally subordinated itself, not to nationalism but to governance and neoliberalism.