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'The turning point…was in the decision of the liberation movement to abandon its exclusive reliance on non-violent campaigning'

I (JSS) received the following letter, posted from Kidlington in the UK on June 8, 2001, from long-time ANC and SACP militant Lionel ‘Rusty’ Bernstein. When I quoted from the letter in my remarks at my own book launch in Durban on April 2, 2007, I was urged by several comrades there to allow the entire text to be published. Given that Bernstein died on June 23, 2002, not long after this letter was sent (and that, his wife, Hilda, noted author and a fellow long-time stalwart in the South African liberation struggle, has also quite recently passed away), I see no reason not to do so, especially since the contents of the letter are likely to be of general interest not only to historians but also to current activists in the South African struggle. As will be apparent, Bernstein was responding to an article of my own, then only just published in Monthly Review (January 2001). My article was to receive a less positive response from certain other militants, including Jeremy Cronin and Raymond Suttner, also writing in the pages of Monthly Review. Both that article itself and my responses to Cronin and Suttner now appear in my The Next Liberation Struggle, a book published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press and the one that we were launching in Durban. The letter itself, with only the insertion of two accidentally omitted words (‘this’ and ‘of’) to convey more clearly the sense of the sentences concerned, is printed exactly as it was typed by Bernstein and received by me. The original letter itself remains in my possession.