Going all the way?
South African labour is increasingly restless. Pierre Beaudet explains why.
A FEW YEARS AGO THE SOUTH AFRICAN workers' movement seemed to be the pivot of the struggle for the construction of a socialist post-apartheid South Africa. Many revolutionaries thought that, together with Brazil and the Philippines, South Africa was becoming the theatre of a new political configuration, combining anti-imperialist national liberation and the construction of a socialist pole. Acting inside the ANC and the South African Communist Party, the popular and working class left hoped that the election of the ANC would be a significant stage in the realisation of these goals. But, nearly two years after the election of Nelson Mandela and his team, the situation looks somewhat different.The trade unions, who constitute the central sector of the workers' movement, seem unsettled, or as Enoch Godongwana, leader of the powerful metalworkers union, NUMSA, puts it; "the bosses say to the ANC that it must choose between the market and the people. One has the impression that the ANC is effectively in the act of choosing, and it is not choosing the people." In a marked contrast to the past discourse on the "transformation" of the South African economy, the ANC now preaches the virtues of the "market" and of "fiscal austerity". Meanwhile, workers' struggles seem to be levelling off. In this context, the left is asking itself: what is the future for socialism in south Africa?
During the 1980s, apartheid South Africa seemed to be faltering. Repeated strikes, semi-insurrectional movements in the townships, a generalised rebellion of the black petty bourgeoisie and uninterrupted mobilisations of the student movement, were several indicators pointing in the same direction; the South African situation was becoming "pre-revolutionary" • For many South Africans, the "new" organised workers movement constituted not only the spinal column of this resistance against apartheid, but also the bearer of a radical project. The trade union federation FOSATU, at its 1982 congress, placed the working class at the centre of the political dynamic of the country.2 This potentiality, which terrified the state and a large portion of the employers, also disturbed the leaders of the nationalist movement, principally the ANC, who distrusted the movement's strength and independence of spirit. From being a decaying and relatively small force at the beginning of the 1970s, the trade union movement had indeed succeeded in acquiring a considerable strength in the course of a few years. At the beginning of the 1980s, several hundred thousand black workers were organised in militant and openly politicised trade unions, notably in manufacturing industry and the mines. In
1984 a virtual general strike paralysed the great metropolitan region of Johannesburg, the industrial heart of the country.
It was in this context of qualitative and quantitative growth at the end of the
1970s that a great debate began on the role of this workers' movement in the struggle against apartheid.
A number of studies and political and theoretical research were then carried out on this question, inside the trade union movement as well as in academic milieus, reflecting a range of political options. Around
South African Labour
Bulletin, for example, which then played a significant role in political debates in South Africa, several argued that the trade unions would be a "school of democracy" allowing the workers to "take their place" on the political and economic scene. Whatever the political regime in place, the organised workers' movement should constitute itself as a serious
"interlocutor" towards the state and the government. Eddie Webster (one of the principal figures around the SALB) proposed that the South African trade union movement, in the style of the Brazilian and
Philippine workers' movements, should become a "social movement"
, a force capable of determining, in a relation of equality with the political organisations, the revolutionary strategy. The trade union organisations should then be "more" than simple intermediaries in the negotiation of the price of labour, but should play two roles at the same time, political and economic. 3
AUTONOMY
Confident in its own growth and supported by these theorisations, a good part of the trade union movement affirmed its will to play an autonomous political role, not necessarily against the nationalist organisNo WORK (1)
LIGHTS 16 No
FOOD NO WATER ations like the ANC, but in all independence, on the basis of the "interests of the working class". This position was notably defended during the 1982 FOSATU congress, at which the federation declared its support for the establishment of a "workers' party" 4
These theoretical elaborations, which accompanied the quite spectacular growth of South African trade unionism, in particular from the end of the 1970s, did not for all that sketch out a clear orientation, as has been pointed out by Claude Jacquin. The organisations oscillated between several options. "Radical" social democratic ideas were advanced by some trade union sectors, notably in textiles, envisaging poliPierre Beaudet is a southern Africa specialist based in Montreal. He writes regularly for Le Monde diplomatique. This article is reprinted from Inprecor n° 396, November 1995
International Viewpoint n° 280 11
SCHOOLS
* South Africa tical action under the form
NO WORK of "pressure" to influence political the actors,
SCHO
GHTS including the ANC, but
NO
N° without posing the question
FooD of power. "Socialism" rem-
NO WATER ained a far off utopia and not a political programme to struggle for. The working class should then content itself with improving its lot, reforming the institutions and imposing a new, "
post apartheid" political framework, in which its
"rights" would be better recognised.
Parallel to this, and in a partially convergent manner, a "councilist" or "autonomist" tendency, proposed by the metalworkers and chemical trade unions among others, was formulated to envisage a workers' movement "free of all affiliation",
, expressing a full class autonomy in the trade union and political terrain. This autonomy would impose an immediate growing over of the struggle for "national liberation" and the opening up of a struggle against capitalism, historically constituted in South
Africa around apartheid, with the objective of imposing a political project that was not only anti-racist but openly socialist. But the councilists could not follow their logic to its end and openly undertake the formation of a workers"
party in reality (the famous 1982 resolution remained a dead letter).
WORKERISM?
One of the important reasons for this was the great offensive unleashed by the
ANC and the South African Communist
Party against these efforts to constitute an autonomous workers' political project. Essentially relayed by the
South African Congress of Trades
Unions (SACTU),° the "trade union branch" of the ANC-CP alliance, this offensive was waged both on the practical and theoretical fronts. The CP accused the new trade union movement of
"workerism," leftism and reformism. For the Communists, the struggle for national liberation against the system of "internal colonialism"
set up by apartheid should take priority. From this struggle against apartheid and uniquely from this struggle would emerge a "second phase" of the combat, around explicitly socialist objectives.
Meanwhile, the trade unions should not propose an autonomous socialist and working class programme:
but take their place in the great alliance against apartheid.?
In reality, the political forces around the
ANC and the CP inside the country, notably in the United Democratic Front, a coalition of community groups and some trade unions, insisted that the trades unions follow their slogans, for example in the organisation of general strikes of a political character. Before this concerted offensive, the workers' organisations, including the left, were forced
12 International Viewpoint to fall back. In 1985, the constitution of COSATU, which was the result of negotiations between the trade union left of FOSATU and forces aligned to the ANC and SACP, was marked by a rallying to nationalist theses and orientations (symbolised by COSATU's acceptance of the Freedom Charter, the central programme of the ANC).
At the end of the 1980s, this turn was accentuated when several trade union militants, including some who had been at the head of the autonomous left, announced that they were joining the Communist Party. During the last phase of the transition, the process accelerated when some trade union leaders became members of parliament as part of the ANC bloc. Some months later when the ANC government was set up, Alec Irwin, former leader of the metalworkers' union and a former "organic intellectual" of the trade union left, became deputy minister of finance. Meanwhile, Jay Naidoo, former general secretary of COSATU, took responsibility for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, which had been, with trade union impulsion, at the heart of the ANC's electoral programme.
Throughout this period, COSATU had supported this evolution without hesitation. In the context of the post-electoral debates on the broadly conservative economic policy followed by the government, the trade unions remained largely marginalised. Even when it was a question of formulating a new legal framework for industrial relations, the trade unions ended up accepting what had not so long ago been considered unacceptable, notably a whole series of restrictions on the right to strike and
La pronounced "legalisation" of the whole process of negotiation. During this time, the strikes that broke out in 1994 by metalworkers and food workers, among others, ended up by fizzling out. In response to the inertia of the union leaderships, spontaneous movements have emerged in a number of sectors (transport, services, education). In the face of the evolution of a macroeconomic policy aligned around the priorities of the IMF and the GATT, the trade unions have contented themselves with protests of principle. With these changes, a cycle seemed to have been completed. The hypothesis of a workers movement constituting itself as the principal and autonomous protagonist of the struggle for political and social transformation seemed put off to much later. The South African working class that, according to some theorisations, was to constitute, along with the workers of Brazil, Korea, and the Philippines, the vanguard of a new international workers' movement, seemed to have fallen back into line, at least temporarily.
The reasons for this recent evolution are multiple and complex. This incapacity to
"go all the way" can no more be explained simply by the "treachery of the leaders" than by the more strictly structural account (according to which the South African working class has not been sufficiently "depeasantised"). A rereading of the history of these struggles and organisations is necessary.
Already in 1991, Robert Fine, in a history of workers' resistance in South Africa, & proposed the parameters of such a critical rereading. In contrast to the official historiography, Fine traced the line that goes from the reinforcement of the workers' movement in the 1930s to its disintegration at the end of the 1950s. For Fine, the Communist Party sought first and foremost to subordinate all struggles to the anti-apartheid movement. If the role of the CP is correctly stressed, Fine does not however neglect the sociological analysis of the workers' movement, its origins and its peasant roots, and the impact of the type of industrialisation that occurred in South Africa. The rapid rise of the manufacturing sector between the two world wars allowed the numerical growth of a young proletariat. But in the aftermath of 1945, a new turn took place. The embryonic industry entered into full stagnation while the traditional role of South Africa as provider of minerals returned to the first level. Those unions rooted in the young industrial proletariat were thus the big losers, while the South African state, even before apartheid, consolidated the system of unqualified migrant labour, destined to work in the mines. In 1946, a powerful but badly organised strike in the mines led to catastrophe (the miners took more than 30 years to recover from this defeat). SUBORDINATION
At the beginning of the 1950s, the CP, proposing to align the workers' movement with the national struggle, seemed to put the sole alternative proposition on the table. But, unlike the Vietnamese or Chinese communists, the SACP persisted in seeing the action of the party as a simple cog of the nationalist movement. In other words, there was no question of struggling for the party to replace the nationalist leadership and itself take in hand the organisation of the national struggle. The racial factor in this evolution was not negligible in that the CP was still at this time an organisation dominated by whites and to a lesser extent by Indians and Coloureds. But this situation was itself the result of a lack of audacity on the part of the communists who had, in Fine's view at least, the opportunity of taking the leadership of the national movement in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, when the ANC was without influence, dominated by a black elite that was very narrowly based and in its majority conservative.
Would a turn of the Maoist type (comparable to that of the Chinese communists after the defeat of the Shanghai insurrection, towards prolonged people's war in the countryside), based on the mobilisation of
the peasants, have been possible in South Africa? The question remains posed. For his part, Fine, who does not believe in such a possibility, explains that the strategy adopted was the worst of choices. On the one hand, the embryo of a militant workers' movement, already established in the manufacturing sector and seeking to implant itself in the mines, was destroyed by the CP's advocacy of the nationalist turn and the over-politicisation of struggles (it was more important to plant the ANC's nationalist flag than to organise viable trade union sections). On the other hand, by subordinating itself to the ANC, the CP prevented itself from developing a popular and militant nationalism, rooted in the rank and file resistance. DEFEAT
This turn of the 1950s and 60s resulted in a formidable defeat, not only for the workers' movement but for the whole of the South African national and democratic movement - a defeat covered up by the SACP. Thus, according to intellectuals close to the CP, the defeat of the 1946 miners' strike was transformed into a "victory" leading to the "radicalisation" of the nationalist movement. At the beginning of the 1950s the ANC proclaimed a new orientation, based on contemporary African experience, based around the armed struggle. On the ground, however, the movement remained confined to a very moderate line. On the other hand, the leadership of the ANC (and the CP) envisaged a strategy based on a "professionalised" ANC, involved for example in the preparation of an armed struggle, in a conception of the "foco" type, isolated from the masses and centred on small groups of supposedly professional guerrillas. This derisory attempt to launch the armed struggle in conditions of ill-preparedness and adventurism provoked a new catastrophe through which the whole of the democratic movement was led astray. Decapitated or forced into exile, the resistance experienced a formidable regression, which persisted until the 1970s.
More than 15 years later, the old mole resurfaced. But changes in the organisation of South African capitalism had to be taken into account. The defeat of the workers' resistance in the 1950s catalysed a significant capitalist boom, first in the mining sector, secondly in the expansion of a manufacturing sector based around import substitution. Little by little a "new" semi-qualified proletariat stabilised itself around this process in the factories, and a "new" trade union movement took root and appeared in broad daylight in Durban in 1973. Trade unionist in the correct sense of the word (close to and emerging from the rank and file), impelled by the struggles and animated by a new generation of militants (from white and Indian leftists to young blacks educated by Christian worker activism, this movement, organised from the outside of the political and organisational influence of the ANC-SACP alliance, grew incessantly. At the end of the 1970s, as mentioned before, the most militant organisations, like FOSATU, began moreover to pose the question of organisation and political power. All the more so given that the links built between the factory and the township had an effect of drawing in the new generation of youth movements rejecting the passivity of the AN and attracted by the militant discourse of the Black Consciousness Movement.
Faced with these changes, the CP unleashed a battle royale against this new left. In certain townships, youth manipulated by the CP even physically attacked trade union militants. The CP meanwhile established several "trade unions" without any real existence on the ground but presented as alternatives, with broad support outside the country. Meanwhile, the mining sector, unorganised since 1946, was able to revive, not through rank and file work as in the manufacturing sector, but rather by an "understanding at the summit" between a new generation of black leaders and the bosses of the mining conglomerates. A new trade union dynamic (involving FOSATU, the trade unions created by the CP and the mining union) then developed, until the negotiations that led to the creation of COSATU in 1985.
The creation of COSATU marked the apotheosis and at the same time the beginning of the decline of trade unions in South Africa. On the one hand, the trade union left of FOSATU, with its social democratic and councilist orientations, could not genuinely elaborate a coherent political project and oppose the ideological hegemony of the ANC and CP. On the other, the centre of trade union gravity shifted by dint of numbers towards the mining sector, which represented both the least organised sector and the most susceptible, because of its composition, to sympathise more with populism and nationalism than with a socialist project based around a perspective of workers' power. The final factor, which played a considerable role, was that South African capitalism entered into crisis from the end of the 1970s, putting an end to the expansion of the manufacturing sector and thus limiting the reproduction of the semi-qualified proletariat in the factories. This recession led to thousands of dismissals and consequently a considerable downturn in industrial struggles. DEMOBILISATION
The leadership of the Communist Party understood this evolution very quickly. To capture the latent radicalism, the CP ado-
South Africa pted a militant populist language, speaking of popular insurrection, of mass armed struggle , of the "Vietnamese model" . With these impractical and premature slogans, several hundred black youth launched themselves into "insurrectionism" in a totally disorganised and destructive manner. This evolution has the same effect as the guerrilla-ism of the 1960s, by demobilising the masses to benefit small badly organised groups that were incapable of seriously threatening the South African army and police. In this new context, the trade union movement was imprisoned in a logic of "support" for a strategy which was totally beyond its control. The principal form of workers' struggle then became the "passive" strike, the "stay-aways" which emptied the factories of workers but which at the same time confined the workers to the townships (quite often by force), under the control of semi-militarised bands proclaiming themselves the "shock troops" of the revolution. Trade union work of struggle and rank and file organisation was thus little by little sidelined
This radical turn allowed the CP to build itself a new base of youth and militants that believed that apartheid was on the verge of being "overthrown" by a new "revolutionary and popular power." But this rhetoric little by little died out. At the end of the 1980s the South African state, under the impulsion of the local bourgeoisie and of imperialism, began to put out feelers to the ANC. At the beginning, these offers of negotiations remained below a minimum level (they resembled that which Israel finally forced on the PLO leadership), offering the ANC an unequal share of power while preserving the white regime. But little by little, a more serious compromise emerged, when Nelson Mandela, who was still in prison, proposed to the white regime substantial concessions in relation to the historic demands of the nationalist movement. After some hesitations, the conditions were then in place for the "great compromise" . Freed in 1990, Nelson Mandela took the nationalist movement in hand. Quite rapidly, the leadership of the CP around Joe Slovo dropped the historic perspective of "overthrowing the state" and restructuring the economy.
Faced with this new context, one part of the trade union left attempted to develop an alternative model of development. Supported by a network of academics, the tried to find responses to two problems: the consolidation of the neo-liberal discourse within the ANC, which now rejected virtually every perspective of economic transformation.
International Viewpoint n° 280 13
* South Africa
The main response on this trade union left was to propose an alternative,
Keynsian-ihspired programme.
Claude Jacquin's book criticises this evolution as a "useless"
capitulation which did not
NO WORK even allow the trade union left to influence the ANC
16 while losing out also "to the
GHTS
NO left" (the trade union rank
FOOD and file which has been
NO WATER destabilised by the new orientation proposed, which abandoned the historic discourse of the "liberation"
and of "socialism"). In practice however, the choices were not unlimited. To remain pertinent in the South African context (there was also the international context of the collapse of "socialism" in the ex-USSR) the left should have advanced concrete propositions necessarily inscribed in a reformist perspective (the conditions were not met, obviously, for a revolutionary rupture in
South Africa).
The second obstacle with which the trade union left was confronted was precisely linked to the Stalinist heritage, reinterpreted in the 1980s in the language of insurrection and revolution. The "radical"
turn of the CP has been an objective catastrophe, in the sense of leading astray a struggle which potentially could have become revolutionary. It has also been a subjective catastrophe. This populism of a demagogic type has led to support for insurrectionism, a totally erroneous view of the transformation, the revolution and of socialism. A significant part of the population of the townships, terrorised by the bands of hooligans paying up service to the "revolution", 10 has ended up by assimilating the idea of revolution to that of terror and violence. For others, principally the generation "without hope" of the young unemployed, the revolution was only a means of asserting their place in a society that rejected them.
The ultimate conclusion of this process could only be a degeneration into populist violence, in a south African version of Sendero Luminoso
(the hypothesis is still posed, in the framework of the development of a populist opposition to the
ANC, around Winnie Mandela in particular).
Because of this second obstacle, the trade union left proposes an alternative based on organisation, the raising of conscsouness, and education, but also a radical-
14 International Viewpoint reformist change, based on the demands of the rank and file and in the framework of an analysis that accepted that a process of revolutionary rupture was not on the agenda.
The recent evolution of the workers' movement is in continuity with its history, a radicalisation intercepted and derailed by a communist party experienced in political struggle but with no desire to orientate the mobilisations towards a rupture of the revolutionary type; an organisational effort broken by crisis and capitalist restructuring; a militant generation sacrificed by years of hard struggle, without any real political openings at the end of it all.
Today in South Africa, the workers' movement is disoriented. A good part of its cadres have been re-deployed, some to join the ANC government, others to b absorbed by private enterprise, which is seeking to change the colour of its spokespersons. The leadership of COSATU now enjoys practically no credibility, neither at the base nor at the summit, where the government and the employers are aware of the real strength of the trade union movement. Powerful trade unions, like the metalworkers, have been shaken by a series of successive defeats. Spontaneous and unorganised wildcat strike movements reflect the combativity that exists, bit above all the despair of a growing section of the working class.
Two significant differences are however to be noted between the current situation and that which existed in the previous cycles. On the one hand the Communist Party has fulfilled it historic role. Not that the organisation as such is going to disappear, at least in the short term. Important sectors of the masses, including trades unionists, remain attached to the CP as the ultimate "rampart" of the struggle. Nonetheless in practice, the CP has already self-dissolved inasmuch as its structures are not operating, a good part of its leadership is openly liquidationist and in essence, the party refuses to have an activity and discourse independent of the ANC. It remains to be seen if this liquidation will become official. It is probable that the leaders of the ANC, starting with Mandela, are against this dissolution inasmuch as it would reopen the road to an explicitly and fiercely independent party of the left. For the trade union and popular left, the dilemma is the following; a break with the ANC is indispensable, but the costs of this rupture, in the short term at least, would be very high. Splits would be numerous. The implicit hostility of certain sectors of the ANC could become explicit and violent, the masses would be disorientated. The debate is however open.
The key question remains the elaboration of a left programme anchored in South African reality and capable of connecting the short term (the immediate demands, of a reformist nature) with the long term (the conditions to pose for a rupture of a revolutionary type).
Fi was necessary t retink the do It will also be necessary to rethink the domain of politics and the organisational questions and to break with the authoritarian and elitist schemas of the past (the vanguard party, to elaborate alternatives appealing more to decentralisation, to networks, to the broadest democratic participation. NUMSA
General Secretary Enoch Godongwana says the left should use the space it continues to enjoy, notably in the popular and trade union movement, and "reinvent" itself: "the revo lutionary struggle to transform society does not begin with the capture of the state, it is also carried out every day in dispersed battles". *
Notes
1. Starting in the 1970s and in particular 1973, a new wave of trade union organisation swept the country and was reflected in a multitude of organised movements. This process led in
1985 to the formation of COSATU. But the trade union movement in South Africa has a history stretching back to the
1920s, when organisations were set up following some very hard struggles. This first wave reached its zenith during the second world war. Subsequently, in the 1950s, the workers' movement weakened to the point of virtual disintegration by the beginning of the 1960s. The Communist Party, whose influence remained determinant in some union sectors, then adopted the option of armed struggle which led its militants to practically cease any trade union work. 2. Founded in 1979, the Federation of South African Trade
Unions was the principal vehicle of the trade union left in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985 FOSATU, like the other union federations, dissolved itself to create COSATU 3, Eddie Webster, "The Rise of Social Movement Unionism: The Two faces of the Black Trade Union Movement in South Africa" in P. Frankel, N. Pines and M. Swilling, State Resistance and Change in South Africa, Croom Helm Publishers, 1988. 4. The proposition came from FOSATU's general secretary, Joe Foster. The report he submitted to the FOSATU congress is reproduced in the appendix to Claude Jacquin, Une gauche syndicale en Afrique du Sud, (1978-1993), L'Harmattan, 1994. 5. Claude Jacquin, op. cit. 6. SACTU, set up in the 1950s as "the" union federation of the ANC and the SACP, was unable to establish itself as a trade union federation, and the tum towards the armed struggle of the 1960s led the trade union cadres to abandon union work for guerrilla warfare. Reconstituted in exile as a "trade union federation" , SACTU was content throughout the 1960s and 70s to be the "trade union" spokesperson of the ANC and the SACP in international congresses and tribunes, while claiming to lead the struggles in south Africa through a clandestine apparatus. In fact SACTU was to a large extent isolated from the trade union wave of the 1970s, which structured itself around totally independent unions that were foreign to the organisation and tradition of SACTU. The CP leadership finally decided to liquidate SACTU in 1991. 7. See in particular "The danger of legal Marxism in South Africa" " signed by Ruth here, in African Communist, the theoretical review of the CP, and reproduced in Jacquin (op. 8. Robert Fine (with Dennis Davis), Beyond Apartheid, Labour and Liberation in South Africa, Raven Press, 1991. 9. The worst example of this historical falsification was published under the form of a history of SACTU, Organize or Starve, the History of SACTU, written in 1980 by Ken Luchart and Brenda Wall, two SACTU sympathisers. The entire workers' history of South Africa is here reduced to the effort of the CP to return the trades unions to the "correct line" from Trotskyist and leftist conspiracies. A no less distorted but at least more intelligent, history, has been put forward by Jeremy Baskin, a CP and COSATU cadre, in Striking Back. a History of COSATU, Raven Press, 1991. For Baskin, the history of the workers' movement is totally linear, without contradiction or debates, in a movement of growing progression where the working class unceasingly approaches power without ever arriving at it! 10. The "com-totsies" as they are called in South Africa, an amalgamation of "comrades" and "totsies" (bandits).