Baruch Hirson

Baruch Hirson (10 December 1921 – 3 October 1999) was a South African political activist and historian.

Baruch Hirson was born to a lower-middle class Jewish family at Doornfontein near Johannesburg. His parents, Joseph and Lily Hirson, had emigrated to South Africa to escape anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire. From the age of four, Hirson attended a Hebrew school in Johannesburg. His mathematical ability enabled him to study as a part-time student at the University of Witwatersrand, matriculating in 1939.

In 1940 he joined Hashomer Hatzair, the radical Zionist youth movement. Encountering organized anti-Semitism from the Greyshirts and those celebrating the centenary of the Great Trek, he moved towards Marxism, joining the Fourth International Organisation of South Africa (FIOSA). Influenced against Stalinism by reading Workers' Front (1938), Fenner Brockway's account of the Spanish Civil War, he became a Trotskyist. From 1944 to 1946 he was full-time-organiser for the Workers' International League, a short-lived Trotskyist group, trying to develop black trade unions despite the Suppression of Communism Act. Hirson came to know other South African Trotskists like M. N. Averbach, Hosea Jaffe, Yudel Burlak and Raff Lee. When the WIL stopped working with unions, Hirson was involved for a while with the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM). In 1950 he joined the Congress of Democrats, the white wing of the ANC-led Congress Alliance, organizing a new Socialist League of Africa. Yet after the Sharpeville Massacre Hirson felt discouraged by the political failure to combat Apartheid: his critique of the movement, '10 Years of the Stay at Home', was written in late 1960.

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