ABSTRACT
The resurgence of black protest offered opportunities for socialists to interact with and influence the movements. But the schism on the left, which had widened since the late 1930s, reinforced organizational rivalries in the broader liberation movement. Political developments in the Western Cape were jolted by the governments announcement in February 1943 of plans to establish a Cape Coloured Permanent Commission and a Coloured section of the Department of the Interior. The increasing severity with which the state attacked black workers seeking moderate improvements in their working conditions was a gloomy harbinger of the ever more vicious policies to be pursued by the National Party after its electoral victory of 1948. Tensions were simultaneously building up in the mining industry. The Communist Party of South Africa's support for the war effort led it to take a topdown approach to popular struggles, inevitably leading it to suppress popular militancy.
