SOUTH AFRICA: COSATU: from independence to subordination

October 15, 2003
Issue 

BY DALE McKINLEY

JOHANNESBURG — As the Congress of South African Trade Unions' (COSATU) eighth national congress, held September 15-18, was winding down, a senior leader, perhaps inadvertently, summed up: "We can only hope that these issues [discussed at the congress] will eventually be adequately dealt with."

Indeed, it would seem as though "hope" is about the only thing that COSATU can count on these days: hope that the ruling African National Congress leaders really mean what they say to the workers about political democracy and socioeconomic justice; hope that corporate capital can be "disciplined" by a vibrant and ideologically tight ANC-COSATU-South African Communist Party alliance to give up its penchant for casualising labour and profit maximisation at the expense of the working class; hope that the SACP can become more than just a top-down socialist talk-shop and lead the workers into the second stage of the "national democratic revolution"; and, hope that somehow the ANC will take the struggles and demands of organised workers and poor communities seriously enough to force a radical change in the government's neoliberal socioeconomic policies that are causing such devastation among the majority of South Africans.

COSATU has not always been hostage to such unrealistic hopes. Almost 10 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the democratic victory of 1994, COSATU's future looked bright. There was a confident belief that its special political positioning as the leading force of the working class in the alliance with the ANC-SACP would provide organised workers with the political and organisational means to influence fundamentally the character of the newly captured state and the socioeconomic policies it would implement.

Workers' expectations were high. COSATU was, by far, the largest and most organised working-class force, its members had democratically forged a socialist-oriented program in the cut and thrust of struggle and there was a burgeoning relationship with a more ideologically open and growing SACP that possessed the potential to offer meaningful intellectual and strategic assistance to organised workers.

However, less than a decade later, COSATU finds itself politically marginalised. The "deployment" of hundreds of its rank and file members and scores from its leadership ranks, as "loyal and disciplined" members of the capitalist ANC, into various state structures has not delivered the kind of political influence expected from an organisation claiming to champion "leading role" of the working class. Instead, what has been "delivered" is a hard lesson in the necessity for political independence, and thus political accountability (not yet learnt by the majority of COSATU's leaders).

Paralysed

COSATU's reliance on the SACP, which over the years has turned its back on working-class struggle and opted instead for the political benefits and material comforts of providing rhetorical left cover for the right-ward shift of the ANC, has not produced a dynamic core of politicised worker-socialists, willing and able to implement COSATU's socialist program. Rather, this reliance has produced a new generation of union leaders steeped in a neo-Stalinist political and organisational methodology that privileges the nebulous multiclass "national democratic revolution" over explicit working-class struggle. The result has been the inculcation of an ANC-type, petit-bourgeois politics that has confused workers and often politically paralysed the various socioeconomic struggles of organised workers.

Even those agreements with the South African state and private sector that COSATU and its alliance partners have hailed as "successes", such as the Labour Relations Act and the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, have been extremely difficult to enforce, especially when there is a lack of mandatory centralised bargaining , while workplace forums are separated from collective bargaining structures in the workplace. Many other basic demands (especially in the public sector), such as consistent inflation-related wage increases, a halt to the scaling down of medical and housing allowances, and protecting the jobs of low-paid and low-skilled workers have also been largely ignored.

More devastating to South African workers is the fact that none of COSATU's major socioeconomic and political demands have been implemented as government policy since 1994.

These demands include: the complete abolition of value added tax (similar to Australia's GST); the decommodification of basic services such as water, electricity, health, housing and education; the socialisation of the mining and financial sectors; a halt to the privatisation of public assets and the consolidation and expansion of public enterprises to drive state-led infrastructural development and job creation; the "freeing-up" of the billions of rands in the government pension fund for tackling poverty; a grassroots-based, participatory budget process at all levels of government; a foreign policy that supports the struggles of progressive "civil society", as well as struggles for national self-determination and democracy (particularly in the Southern Africa region); and, the cancellation of the apartheid debt and the payment of full reparations to apartheid's victims.

The failure of the ANC government to be a meaningful political vehicle for COSATU and the working-class interests it shoulders should have resulted in COSATU's affiliates and leaders furiously discussing intensifying class struggle and exploring political alternatives to the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance. Instead, COSATU's eighth national congress was dominated by speeches from ANC and SACP leaders, limited debate and stale rhetoric from the COSATU leadership, which simultaneously decried the continuing ineffectiveness of the alliance and recycled ineffective insider "solutions". As one worker-delegate proclaimed in exasperation: "The first two days were like an ANC rally."

Stale rhetoric

The resolutions on COSATU's alliance with the ANC-SACP contained the same meaningless bureaucratic rhetoric masquerading as solutions: a better functioning "political centre" for the alliance to drive government policy; another "common program" to "strengthen" the alliance; regular meetings of the alliance leadership; more "space for the working class to protest" against anti-worker government policy; and, yet another "review" of government's macroeconomic policies to ensure they "create, not destroy" jobs.

At its congress, COSATU did begin a process of addressing serious organisational and financial problems that are afflicting many COSATU affiliates. Yet, the unwillingness to draw the links between COSATU's political relationship with the ANC-SACP and the effects on workers of the ANC government's neoliberal policies ensures that the roots of such problems cannot, and will not, be fundamentally tackled.

Similarly, a watered-down resolution on COSATU's engagement with the emerging progressive social movements simply acknowledged the growth of these movements and the need to address the issues they are raising. There was absolutely no attempt to acknowledge that the emergence of these militant new social movements — fighting evictions, water and electricity cut-offs and for access to anti-AIDS medicines — is a result of the ANC government's neoliberal policies and a reaction to the failure of COSATU and the SACP to politically challenge the ANC or lend their organisational power to intensify and broaden the common struggles of organised workers and poor communities.

COSATU's 8th congress was a huge step backwards for organised workers and the entire working class in South Africa. There was an abject failure to confront the negative realities of its alliance with the ANC-SACP. COSATU failed to embrace the political necessity and radical potential of rapidly increasing community struggles and progressive trade unionism to tackle the domestic and international dominance of capitalist neoliberalism.

These failures have been, and continue to be, sustained by the willingness and ability of the COSATU leadership, alongside those of its alliance partners, to make elite-compacts at the expense of the interests and struggles of the workers and poor. In South Africa's present economic and political circumstances, framed by the ANC's strategic vision and practical pursuit of a deracialised capitalism, such elitist compacts only serve to further entrench the class interests of corporate capitalists and an emergent black bourgeoisie. The elite-led political and economic corporatism that continues to be pursued by the COSATU leadership will leave workers further divided organisationally and with consistently less political leverage over socioeconomic change.

Even more fundamentally, the political "management of contradictions" which was on display at the COSATU congress, ostensibly meant to ensure the "unity" of the alliance, serves to redirect working-class struggle away from where it needs to be — attacking the exploitative nature of capitalist productive and social relations. For example, what does COSATU's call for an alliance agreement on industrial policy mean in the context of an economy in which private capital holds the vast majority of the wealth and controls the productive levers? Likewise, how is COSATU going to use the alliance to force the state to implement a strategy of job creation if the ANC government is not willing to attack the capitalists' control of production?

As loyal members of an alliance dominated by a capitalist government, these are political questions that the COSATU leaders dare not ask. Yet, they are questions that any workers' organisation must not only ask, but must find ways to concretely address.

While the ANC-SACP-COSATU alliance might continue to survive for some time, political and organisational independence of working-class forces is fundamental if COSATU is to play a central role in shaping and revolutionising South African society. Anything less simply means increased subordination.

[Dale McKinley is a former chairperson of the SACP's Johannesburg central branch. He is an activist with the Anti-Privatisation Forum.]

From Green Left Weekly, October 15, 2003.
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