Strains in the Alliance
The labour press admits that The lahour nrace admite that "beneath the semblance of cohesion within the Alliance serious tensions and strategic differences exist and continue to grow". (SALB Feb. 1997). The business press is more forthright: "GEAR [the government's new development plan] gave rise to talk within the SACP of the party cutting loose and contesting the 1999 election under its own banner. Within COSATU rumblings surfaced about forming a separate Workers' Party". Not surprisingly, the rumours of a split between the Communist Party and the ANC provoked a flurry of conflicting assessments within the left. COSATU's executive committee was unambiguous: "Government's macro-economic framework takes a direction diametrically opposed to the economic growth path outlined in the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) Based on the economic model of the IMF/ World Bank and Reserve Bank, it will not enable the creation of 400,000 new jobs, nor deliver the social needs of our people. At most it will increase the gap between rich and poor, and condemn the homeless and jobless to extreme levels of poverty"
At his union's 1996, conference, Miners' Union (NUMSA) president Godongwana, a member of the COSATU executive committee, had rejected GEAR as a "sop to neoliberalism". . But by February 1997 he was pouring oil on troubled waters: "because we [the Alliance partners] come from the same perspective there is agreement on objectives. The difference is over what instruments and tools we use to achieve them"
This climb-down came after the SACP (Godongwana is a member) had decided to "keep talking to influence the ANC on details and implementation". Jeremy Cronin, SACP deputy General Secretary, was equally reassuring: "The Alliance will be around for a long time". , he said, contradicting his earlier comment that "we never said the Alliance would last forever"
Tensions in the Alliance preceded the GEAR programme. It has its roots in the practical requirements of a "National Democratic Revolution". . This (essentially SACP) notion requires that COSATU give up its class independence by putting 'national' interests before working class interests. This has never sat comfortably with the unions and raised outcries when the RDP [drafted by the unions] was stripped of all class content by the ANC.
The pro-bourgeois logic of the "National Democratic Revolution" became more apparent once the ANC was in charge of the state and began falling increasingly under the influence of capital. Soon the ANC shifted policy-making functions out of its extra-parliamentary structures, away from the Alliance and into the hands of 'specialist advisors', IMF/World Bank, etc. [see p. 25]. This shift in class allegiance resulted in the ANC presenting GEAR to its Alliance partners as a fait accompli, not open to negotiation.