South African unions vie for control of militant workers
Part one
@ http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/02/20/safr-f20.html
By Thabo Seseane Jr.
20 February 2014
On February 3, about 1,800 National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) members at Anglo American Platinum’s (Amplats’) processing division joined a strike of at least 70,000 workers called by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU).
AMCU called the strike on January 23 at the world’s top three platinum producers, Amplats, Impala Platinum Mining (Implats) and Lonmin.
The union’s main demand was a wage increase to R12,500 (US$1,136) per month, almost three times what entry-level workers now earn.
By February 17 the parties were no closer to a resolution. Talks had broken off two weeks before so that the labour dispute resolution body, the Committee for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA), could engage the parties individually.
In an indication of the unease in ruling circles over the protracted action, on February 18 Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan called for an end to the strike, with Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani vowing to sell the group’s labour-intensive platinum mines at which workers have struck.
The strike decision by NUMSA is an escalation of its standoff with the dominant trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Differences among the trade union elite reached a pitch in August 2012 with the suspension of COSATU General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi .
Formal charges against him include bringing COSATU into disrepute through a sex scandal and unauthorised spending, including on his wife and ex-wife.
In official discourse, on one side were the “pro-capitalist” Jacob Zuma loyalists, including COSATU President S’dumo Dlamini and National Education Health and Allied Workers Union General Secretary Fikile Majola.
Ranged against them, were the “pro-socialist” leaders of NUMSA, Irvin Jim and Karl Cloete, with support from co-thinkers in eight other unions.
In fact, neither group represents the working class.
The present factional disagreement, as intense as it is, is only a difference over tactics.
Vavi’s essential argument against people like Zuma is not that capitalism needs to be overthrown.
He is only urging greater subterfuge in the way that workers are used by the Tripartite Alliance on behalf of its capitalist masters.
For their own reasons, including a desire not to set precedents by submitting to working class pressure, the pro-Zuma faction has set out to make an example of Vavi.
COSATU factionalism can be traced back at least into the Mandela administration.
Significant factions in the African Nationalist Congress (ANC) were relenting to pressure from global capital not to repudiate the state's apartheid-era debts and to manage the economy "responsibly".
ANC leaders considered all alternatives to laissez-faire capitalism unviable, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
As a member of the Tripartite Alliance with the ruling ANC and Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), COSATU became a vital means of attracting the working class vote and then subordinating it to the ANC's perpetuation of a privileged capitalist minority.
Vavi and others paid lip service to workers’ demands.
They bemoaned the open ANC co-optation of unionists and its attempts to turn COSATU into a "labour desk" of the ANC. COSATU and the SACP at that time stood together in taking exception to the "1996 Class Project" by which ANC "nationalists," including Thabo Mbeki, invalidated their policy contributions.
In the cautious critique of current deputy transport minister and SACP deputy general secretary, Jeremy Cronin, the 1996 Class Project depended:
- “upon the ANC and alliance for electoral reproduction but [...] seeks to hollow-out the movement at the same time[.]”
The hollowing-out found expression in the way former unionists were fast-tracked through the ANC ranks, including Kgalema Motlanthe, Gwede Mantashe, Mbhazima Shilowa and Cyril Ramaphosa.
They won such promotion by explicitly putting party loyalty first and their union members last.
For this reason, COSATU members for years resisted the idea of Vavi being “redeployed”, for instance to parliament. Vavi himself deftly played on the sentiments of ordinary unionists.
This made him the darling of other trade union leaders who were excluded by the ANC from the benefits of access to state resources.
Vavi’s section of the trade union elite exploited working class outrage at the pro-rich policies of the two Mbeki administrations.
Vavi’s acolytes channelled mass resentment into support for Jacob Zuma, when Mbeki, even going to the extent of using state organs to scapegoat Zuma in a series of scandals, ended up firing him from the deputy presidency in 2005.
COSATU delegates to the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference cooperated with the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) of Julius Malema to elect Zuma president over Mbeki.
They did this on the understanding that union bureaucrats would thereafter have, among other things, greater say over policy, thereby burnishing their image with the union rank-and-file.
Investor-friendly policies would be masked through formulations like “broad-based black economic empowerment” (BEE).
Inevitably, the first beneficiaries of such a policy would be the leaders of the pro-Zuma faction.
Zuma, however, simply could not deliver to the expectations of all.
Most of the choicest BEE deals in any case had already gone to members of the court of Mbeki, including Saki Macozoma, Mzi Khumalo and most prominently, billionaire Patrice Motsepe, brother-in-law to Zuma’s Justice Minister Jeff Radebe.
Worst of all, by the time Zuma took over from caretaker-President Kgalema Motlanthe after the 2009 general election, the global credit crisis was in full swing.
Foreign direct investment flows languished at some 2 percent of GDP, or US$1.7 billion net in 2012, a 43.6 percent year-on-year decline, according to the United Nations Global Investment Trends Monitor.
As in other emerging markets, current outflows are bound to worsen with the ongoing “tapering” of the original US$85 billion per month asset-and bond-buying programme of the United States Federal Reserve Board.
To workers, Zuma nonetheless made a lightheaded promise in 2011, on which he will clearly never deliver, to create five million jobs in 10 years.
To investors, he strove to project an image of fiscal austerity, partly by retaining Mbeki’s finance minister Trevor Manuel in a new economic planning portfolio.
Julius Malema promptly turned the ANCYL on Zuma, when he saw the cup thus being snatched from his lips.
He openly campaigned for Zuma’s removal as ANC president at the party’s 2012 Mangaung conference.
On the conference agenda, he had managed to have the question of nationalisation of mines and farms included for debate.
However, he failed to have Zuma removed, was expelled after a disciplinary hearing for bringing the party into disrepute, and saw the ANCYL dismembered amid his (Malema’s) continuing corruption woes.
Malema’s founding of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) was his response.
The reaction of COSATU’s largest affiliate, NUMSA, came at a special national congress in Ekurhuleni, east of Johannesburg last December.
That convention called on Zuma to resign, resolved to withhold logistical and financial support to the ANC election effort, to freeze affiliation fee payments to COSATU and to investigate the feasibility of forming a united front of nominally leftist organisations as an “alternative” to the ANC.
At the same time, NUMSA has fought to have COSATU convene a special national congress.
There, the nine pro-Vavi unions would quash the charges against him, reinstate him as general secretary and boot out the opposing faction under Dlamini.
Senior trade union officials could then apply themselves to the round of machinations necessary to secure their political ascendancy.
While the union elite squabble among themselves for spheres of influence, the working class has observed and drawn its own conclusions.
Here the miners were in the vanguard with their decision that they could only count on obstruction from bourgeois organisations like NUMSA—the ex-union of Motlanthe, Mantashe and Ramaphosa, the archetype of the junior local partners whose enrichment have made possible the continued imperialist exploitation of South African workers.
Ramaphosa belongs in the same class as leaders like Nelson Mandela and the Stalinist Joe Slovo for his services to capitalism.
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Part two
@ http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/02/21/saf2-f21.html
By Thabo Seseane Jr.
21 February 2014
This is the conclusion of a two-part comment on the manoeuvres of South Africa’s trade unions to contain growing militancy in the working class. Part one was posted February 20.
For many workers, the term “trade union” can invoke the image of an organ — even if it is dominated by a privileged bureaucracy that refuses to fundamentally challenge capitalism — through which workers can wrest concessions from the employers.
This image, however, bears no relation to present reality.
Over time the unions have increasingly assumed the role of labour managers on behalf of the employers and the government.
Due to the impact of globalised production, this process of corporatist transformation of the old nationally-based labour bureaucracies has assumed a finished form.
The bourgeoisie relentlessly demands from the trade union leaders a universal levelling down of the living standards of the working class in the name of global competitiveness.
In these circumstances, securing even limited concessions for their members has given way to a constant process of surrendering previously-won gains, the suppression of the class struggle, and one betrayal after another when strikes cannot be prevented.
The net result has been a pronounced deterioration of the social position of the working class in every country, measured above all in an absolute decline in the share of GDP that goes to labour.
At the same time, the social gulf between the trade union bureaucracy and the working class has assumed unprecedented dimensions.
This is a global phenomenon, but in South Africa it has taken extreme expression.
In the aftermath of the fall of apartheid, South African capitalists knew that their brutal system of exploitation would lead to revolution unless there were examples of black capitalists whom they could hold up as role models that the masses could one day hope to emulate.
This was the real function of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).
For most blacks, the BEE policies, which have so nicely served capitalists, including now fabulously wealthy “trade unionists,” are tantamount to immiseration and not empowerment.
The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the junior partner of the capitalist elite, sold out strike after strike in its ever-growing alignment with the ANC government’s pro-business agenda.
This alignment continued in the prelude to the police massacre at Marikana, as set out in an article in the Daily Maverick by Jared Sacks.
He reports that rock drill operators, the lowest-paid workers at the Lonmin mine, approached their NUM representatives for support in going on strike.
The NUM officials responded by denouncing the workers.
Workers took matters into their own hands by directly going to Lonmin management offices on August 10, 2012, but were turned back by a Lonmin official who fetched an NUM representative—who also would have nothing to do with them.
Unarmed workers marched to the NUM’s offices in Wonderkop to present the bureaucrats with a memorandum on August 11.
NUM officials at the office literally came out with guns blazing, killing two workers in the group.
It was then that workers first armed themselves and reprisal killings began. Rank-and-file disaffection with the NUM and the privileges of shop stewards would later encourage the opportunistic growth of the new union AMCU, with its intimations of responding to increased worker militancy.
The events at the Lonmin mine in Marikana on August 16, 2012 were a watershed from which there is no going back.
Here the world saw, for the first time, the results of years of integration of the trade union bureaucrats into the state apparatus and the bourgeoisie itself.
Following days of unrest, striking miners occupied a hillock on public land, refusing to descend until mine management discussed wages with them.
South African Police Service (SAPS) officers then corralled the miners, laying out lengths of razor wire around them and using armoured vehicles to press them together.
When a group finally tried to break through (other reports say they were running from live fire coming from a helicopter) the police line opened fire with assault rifles, mowing down 34 in a scene recalling the worst apartheid-era repression.
Most of the killing, however, took place away from the cameras of the world’s media organisations when armoured vehicles rode over miners and police combed a rocky outcrop in the area known as Small Koppie.
There they cornered miners singly or in twos and threes, cold-bloodedly assassinating them although arrest was feasible.
The SAPS carried out this atrocity with the full support of the Zuma government. To a large extent, they did this at the behest, most proximately, of Cyril Ramaphosa and NUM General Secretary Frans Baleni.
Ramaphosa, the former NUM leader, was by then a rand billionaire sitting on Lonmin’s board of directors, owning fully 9 percent of Marikana through a controlling stake in Lonmin’s Black Economic Empowerment partner, Incwala Resources, for which he was pocketing about US$18 million a year.
He had earlier warned Mining and Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu that her lack of engagement did not go down well with international capital.
In an email to Police Commissioner Riah Phiyega, Ramaphosa denounced strikers as “dastardly criminals” deserving harsh reprisal.
Baleni’s calculations were possibly predicated on the enormous gains in membership that AMCU had won at the NUM’s expense.
The process of AMCU displacing the NUM as the official workers’ representation was already advanced at several workplaces.
Little wonder that Baleni praised the Marikana “clean-up” in terms more befitting a securocrat than a workers’ representative:
“The police were patient, but these people were extremely armed with dangerous weapons,” he said.
The visceral reaction of the bourgeois and upper-middle-class COSATU leaders to AMCU tends to suggest that AMCU is a union totally unlike the old organisations.
Indeed AMCU executives like to present it as a maverick that recruits members across sectors, remains outside COSATU and adopts uncompromising positions in wage negotiations.
No such appraisal should be accepted. General Secretary Joseph Mathunjwa likes to portray himself as a man of the people, but that did not stop him from arriving at Marikana on the eve of the present strike in a Lexus with bodyguards attending.
Mathunjwa is a former NUM member whose ejection from that union accounts, in the views of some, for his supposed vendetta against his old union.
Whatever he hopes to gain by his confrontation with mining employers, a re-ordering of society in the interests of the working-class majority is not on his agenda.
He boasts of his Christianity, and has described AMCU as non-political and non-socialist.
In spite of its present militant radicalism, the experience of Solidarnosc in Poland testifies as to how such formations cannot serve as the basis in the long term for independent action by the working class.
Eventually, they are integrated into the political structures of the bourgeoisie.
The indelible lesson of Marikana is that it is perfectly feasible for a black government, voted for by probably the majority of the black miners on that knoll, to order a mostly black police force to cut them down in the interests of a partly black-owned mine.
Workers are unavoidably drawing the conclusion that organisations of future struggle need to be founded on the basis of class principles, not race.
Irvin Jim, Karl Cloete, Zwelinzima Vavi and company all profess their own commitment to class-based struggle.
Yet the interests of this wealthy layer of union bureaucrats depend on race-based and pro-capitalist policies such as BEE that diverge fundamentally from the interests of ordinary workers.
The bureaucrats mean only to use worker resistance to capitalist repression as a bargaining chip in order to secure a better place for themselves at the table with the ANC, without insisting on a new economic dispensation.
With the recent flare-up in strikes, including in the car-manufacturing industry, workers are looking for organisations that will point them in the direction of independent class struggle.
Neither AMCU nor the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) deserve to be borne aloft on the wave of worker rebellion since Marikana, and nor will they be.
The most advanced and militant sections of workers must instead orient themselves on new internationalist and socialist political foundations in the building of new organisations of class struggle.
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@ http://historymatters.co.za/forging-new-movement-numsa-shift-south-africas-politics-leonard-gentle/
Forging a new movement: NUMSA and the shift in South Africa’s politics by Leonard Gentle
February 4, 2014
[ Democracy ]
January 28, 2014 —
SACSIS —
The decision of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) to cut ties with the African National Congress (ANC) has received poor analysis. Comment has tended to focus on the possibility of a new political party in 2019 or whether all this means that suspended general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) Zwelinzima Vavi will get his job back.
The greater significance of the biggest trade union in the country throwing in its lot with a growing movement in opposition to the neoliberal order, and thus to the left of the ANC, rather than the line up to the right is being missed.
This very week NUMSA is holding a national political school, which culminates in an “expo” of forces of resistance, to which activists and communities that have been active in service delivery struggles, have been invited. This is part of NUMSA’s declared commitment to what it calls a “united front” from below.
In discussing the events unleashed by the Marikana massacre, some of us have been declaring that the seeds of a new movement have been sown. But equipped only with the notions of political parties, trade unions and other such organisational forms, commentators have been ill equipped to grapple with the meaning of this notion of a movement.
Movements in motion
We have lived for the past 20 odd-years with the marginalisation of ordinary people from any power over their own lives. For at least half those years millions of people were not active in campaigns and in contesting the quality of their lives, as they gave the ANC (the party that had stood at the head of the liberation movement) a chance to express in legislation and in practice what people had envisioned from that movement. In practice, the anti-apartheid movement was laid to rest. Politics therefore became the exclusive terrain of political parties, particularly those represented in parliament. And parliament replaced the streets, factories and communities where political parties were expected to earn their credibility.
The people, as political agents in a broad mass movement, were replaced by the individual voter participating in secret at the ballot box once every five years. Occasional flare-ups or disputes were settled through the courts. The press conference replaced the mass rally as the means whereby politicians talked to the people. Journalistic comment and media reports therefore only knew about political parties and their press conferences.
This is not a uniquely South African phenomenon. Globally this passive citizenry has, until now, been the stuff of the political terrain in all countries for nearly 30 years. The last three decades were also the years of the triumph of neoliberal capitalism and the biggest attacks on the living standards of ordinary people since World War I.
Neoliberalism relies on the passivity of ordinary people and the complicity of all political parties that have confined politics to the world of the ballot box and the press conference. But South Africa had an active mass movement until the 1980s, so our neoliberalism would have to await the triumph of an ANC de-linked from that mass movement — transformed in its own language from a ”liberation movement to a political party”.
Our trade unions also evolved from a labour movement seeking broader social transformation to a set of trade unions indulging in collective bargaining within the range prescribed by labour relations law. They too would have their parliamentary officers tracking new labour laws and the press conference replacing the factory general meetings and the mass rallies of their constituencies.
So the movement was replaced by a party and the party by its leadership and the leadership by a few individuals. And political comment has become obsessed with the cult of individuals. We have even lost the language to distinguish between a movement, parties, organisations and individuals.
For the past 10 years we have had community protests in every township across the country. But because these did not fit the mould of political parties and press conferences, they did not make the media. And where commentators reflected on these it was only, until recently, as instances of "unrest" and criminality.
A movement is not the same as a party, although parties may seek hegemony within a movement. A movement is also not the same as an organisation, although myriads of organisations, large and small, may make up a movement. Sometimes commentators failing to understand this notion of a movement call acts of popular resistance, which make up a movement, “spontaneous” because they cannot identify well-known leaders. Thereby denying the agency of ordinary people and their capacity for tactical and strategic acumen.
The movement that grew to a peak in the 1980s was one that had a number of features. First, there was a common enemy that unified the movement. That enemy was apartheid and all the associated 1970s reforms that the government tried, which were seen as mere attempts at prolonging apartheid. Second, all localised struggles against this or that instance of injustice were seen as code for resisting apartheid. So local struggles fed into the national movement. All reforms were rejected and institutions boycotted.
This was not because this or that organisation issued such an instruction, but because the movement had established this as its prerogative. This sometimes meant that even a small organisation could call for a march or a boycott way beyond its actual organisational capacity because such a call corresponded with the mood of the movement.
The ANC had sunk deep roots in the 1950s movement and its status was cemented after going into exile. But the ANC did not “organise” the movement, let alone prescribe what people should do. When the ANC contemplated some tactical turn, which went against the tenets of the movement, it had to tread warily and try very hard to persuade the movement, and the outcome wasn’t guaranteed.
By definition a movement is heterogeneous, comprising such a range of experiences and organisational forms that no party or single organisation can encompass that range. The mass movement of the 1980s recognised the ANC as having the leading role, but the ANC was by no means the only political force, and when people joined the ANC they brought all these different tendencies and experiences to the ANC and made it what ANC-apologists love to call today, a “broad church”.
Which is why the Marikana massacre was such a historic moment. It signalled that the ANC is no longer a “broad church” but a party of the very rich – those whose interests must be defended, violently, if necessary. In so doing, it freed activists from any further illusions of transforming the ANC into the movement it was in the 1980s. It meant that all the local struggles in communities of the past 15 years and all the workplace struggles that broke out after Marikana no longer look to the ANC and its allies for strength. They look to themselves.
It now means that any development in the political or labour sphere will be measured against the rising tide of a movement, which no longer looks to the ANC or any of the parties in parliament, or any labour desk in the tripartite National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) for any hope of a better future.
Even Julius Malema has recognised this – giving up his career as a chicken farmer to start a new party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which speaks, opportunistically, the language of this new movement. This is what the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) is discovering now. Workers swamped its ranks because it wasn’t the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). Now workers want AMCU to be part of a new movement and to be a broad church. And AMCU is simply not equipped to be so.
The aftermath of Marikana also revealed that the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) stood outside and in opposition to this new movement. Such a position for a federation that once had deep roots in the working class was surely going to precipitate tensions within its ranks.
The anti-Mbeki forces unravel
So, to the NUMSA Special National Congress of December 2013 and its decisions.
Most comment has without fail reduced this to the decision not to back the ANC in the 2014 elections and largely to ascribe this to the suspension of Vavi. This makes for facile comment and for easy but false resolution. All COSATU needs to do is reinstate Vavi and the war will be over.
This may well be the position of those COSATU affiliates who have championed a special congress to review Vavi's suspension. But, like Malema's EFF, the background events to the NUMSA fight in COSATU can be traced to the make-up of disgruntled forces that overthrew Thabo Mbeki as ANC president. The South African Communist Party (SACP), COSATU and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) were a coterie of conspirators who made a pact with Jacob Zuma that in return for seats at the table of the state, they would champion a deeply flawed individual into the highest office.
Mbeki had had no truck with those for whom the state was merely a vehicle for private wealth projects and lost little time dealing with Zuma, his own deputy president, who was caught doing precisely this. But this opened the door for a layer of disgruntled elements — some with their own agendas of seeking a state for rentier capitalism and others with political axes to grind. These forces rallied together behind the SACP, COSATU and the ANCYL to drive Mbeki out after making a Faustian pact with Zuma.
And what did the Zuma project deliver?
Cabinet positions for individual COSATU, SACP and ANCYL leaders and a veritable culture of cronyism and looting of the state. Then the ladder of advancement was whisked away and when Malema over-reached himself, he was expelled … and so the erstwhile-unified forces of disgruntlement unravelled.
Meanwhile throughout the Mbeki years the victims of his neoliberalism — the new working class of urban and rural poor, the youth and the unemployed — have been in increasing revolt, a revolt of service delivery protests carried out beneath the radar of middle-class public opinion. The system of labour relations and compliant trade unions kept a lid on the rising dissatisfaction in the industrial sphere until the revolts spilled over into the communities surrounding the platinum mines in the North West and found a disgraced NUM incapable of having any moral authority to police the dissent. And then came Marikana …
Of all the conspirators, the SACP is most distant from struggles and cannot fathom an independent existence outside the state. The SACP has nowhere else to go except to act as the Rottweiler of the Zuma regime, turning first on Malema and then on COSATU. Vavi’s sexual power games may have provided the ammunition but it was the SACP that turned on its ex-ally. But instead of kowtowing to the SACP line, Marikana has also emboldened a NUMSA leadership to contemplate mutiny.
Why NUMSA?
NUMSA has always been the left critic within COSATU. Its roots can be found in the traditions of the independent socialism of the Federation of South African Trade unions (FOSATU) and the Metal and Allied Workers Union (MAWU), which precede the formation of COSATU — a tradition to the left of the SACP and long castigated as “workerism” by the SACP and the ANC since the 1980s.
Not that NUMSA was ever politically monolithic. Its leadership cadre make up was always an entente between a political group located within the Eastern Cape SACP, an old independent socialist layer coming from the Witwatersrand region and a layer of syndicalist policy technocrats. This entente made NUMSA unique within COSATU and saw it campaign for a Workers’ Charter in 1987 and for COSATU to break with the tripartite alliance in 1993. Already in the run-up to the ANC’s 2009 Polokwane conference there were moves within COSATU to discipline NUMSA for not being enthusiastic enough backers of the Zuma project.
And unlike the public sector unions that dominate COSATU (from whence its Zuma-loyal president, Sdumo Dlamini, comes) and where the membership is a new middle class of white-collar workers, NUMSA still has the blue-collar workers of its militant days in the steel and engineering companies of the Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal and the Vaal.
With the break-up of the old Zuma alliance, it is therefore not surprising that it is NUMSA that has responded in the way that it has. It is also significant that NUMSA members took their decisions at a special congress preceded by a process of political discussion and democratic debate from their locals and regions.
Obsessed by the forthcoming 2014 general elections and with only a short-term understanding of politics, the media have struggled to understand the NUMSA developments. So it’s either about making up an alliance with EFF (you see they’re all left wing, so they must be together) or it’s all about personalities like Vavi (where NUMSA’s initiative is viewed as little more than a ploy to save Vavi’s career).
If we're only looking at the 2014 general elections or if we examine this situation only through the lens of trade unionism, then we miss the significance of the NUMSA split entirely.
All great parties in the world, conservative or progressive, came about as outcomes of long-gestating social movements. The US Democrats can trace their roots to small farmers of the South resisting the freeing of slaves and the struggles of the Civil War, while the Republicans were the party of the northern industrialists. The British Labour Party has a social movement lineage going back to the Chartist movement of the 19th century and emerged out of struggles by trade unions to find an electoral voice. The ANC outgrew its elite roots amongst chiefs and "educate natives" to head up a mass anti-apartheid movement since the 1950s.
For years many have bemoaned the fact that the quality of South Africa's democracy is hampered by the absence of a political alternative to the left of the ANC. All the political parties in parliament support the quest of South African corporations to be internationally competitive while endorsing the neoliberal GEAR economic program and the privatisation of public services. All base themselves on the flawed compromises that established the constitutional order at Kempton Park.
For long now that absence has been seen as rectifiable simply by conjuring up a left party to fill the gap.
After the Marikana massacre and its subsequent strike wave, there was much talk about the seeds of a new movement being sown. The significance of the NUMSA initiative is precisely that it takes forward this narrative. Why? Because it states unequivocally that the future of South Africa lies in a movement to the left of the ANC and, by seeking to find common cause with township activists and militant workers on the platinum belt who have been struggling for the past decade, it is an implicit acknowledgement that a new movement is already underway.
This does not mean that there will not be difficulties, as NUMSA seeks to find space within this new movement. For one, NUMSA has not yet begun to reflect politically on the sources of the ANC’s shift to becoming a neoliberal party and even mistakenly takes the National Development Plan as that Rubicon-crossing moment, rather than the compromises at Kempton Park or GEAR. For another, it hasn’t yet done an assessment of the appropriateness of the trade union form in the context of the changing working class under neoliberalism. Rather, it seeks to keep the union form, but merely organise workers within the “pipeline” of manufacture.
Nevertheless, NUMSA’s commitment to a movement for socialism is appropriate as is the idea of a “united front” from below, understood as a program of joint campaigns with other movements and community groups rather than a political party. It seeks to start the process by convening a political school, which creates spaces for social movements to participate. This may overcome a long-standing weakness whereby working-class communities have been struggling, while unionised workers have been dormant. In doing so, it offers the possibility that the nearly 10-year revolt of the poor may be complemented by an industrial partner and so help to forge such a national movement worthy of that cause.
[Leonard Gentle is the director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (ILRIG), an NGO that produces educational materials for activists in social movements and trade unions.]