The labour movement is battling with the dilemma of remaining loyal to the ANC or taking action to force economic change. Gaye Davis and Justin Pearce report
WHILE Cosatu this week claimed the banks’ climb-down over interest rates as a victory, the finance institutions knocked the wind from the sails of an attempt by the labour federation to re-marshal the mass democratic movement against the government’s new economic policies.
Organisations which met last week to map a campaign culminating in a day of action on July 13 will gather again on Friday to review the situation and plan a further strategy.
The meeting will include representatives of the ANC/Cosatu/SACP alliance, the civic movement Sanco, the student organisations Sasco, Cosas, Young Christian Students, the Muslim Youth Movement, Call of Islam and the unions Numsa, Ppwawu and Nehawu.
In their coalescing around a campaign against the banks, some saw glimmers of hope that it would mark a new beginning for the left, in which it would re- gather its forces sufficiently to challenge both capital and the state — and assert itself in what is now the central political debate: the trajectory of the country’s economy.
Dr Patrick Bond, a senior economist with the National Institute for Economic Policy, and Mzwanele Mayekiso, head of Sanco’s Development Research Institute, believe the ”denouement” of the ANC/SACP national democratic revolution —because of global economics and political compromises concluded during negotiations — has ”left the impoverished majority frustrated and the left divided and confused”.
They believe salvation lies not only with the emergence of strong, working-class parties but in building a class-conscious civil society that would oppose market-oriented development in favour of people-centred development.
But they say the dilemma for the Mass Democratic Movement is that it is ”stuck between understandably fierce loyalties to the ANC … and a grim recognition that not much has changed, or will, in socio-economic terms”, resulting in a growing tendency to corporatism — ”elite deal-making” between government, labour and capital.
The left is trying to galvanise itself. But the challenges are great.
South Africa’s labour movement is facing its biggest crisis yet. Labour analysts across the spectrum agree the unions must yet meet the challenge of working with their old ally, the ANC, as government, taking on a harsh new global economic order and battling with declining membership.
In a South African Labour Bulletin article published earlier this year, Jeremy Baskin, director of the National Labour and Economic Development Institute (Naledi), notes a 6% fall in union membership in the past two years, a decline particularly marked in the manufacturing sector (down 15% on 1991 figures). The only sector showing membership growth is the public service, which Baskin attributes to staff associations becoming unions and unease prompted by government’s plans to rationalise.
University of the Witwatersrand industrial sociologist Professor Eddie Webster, in an article in Southern Africa Report, identifies both the transition to democracy and the equally profound economic transition as defining the new terrain in which unions must now operate.
There is a perception that government has moved in a direction not favoured by labour because, in the words of one analyst, ”other classes and groups are better organised” (read big business).
”There is no clear sense of where we are going, and that is very undermining,” said one analyst. But organised labour’s record since the 1994 elections show it still has the capacity to organise strikes and street protests. Analysts cite too that Cosatu’s alliance with the ANC has won it some ground, both in the Labour Relations Act and in the Constitution.
Whether these gains can be translated into a tangible impact on the government’s policy direction remains to be seen, however, particularly with the Reconstruction and Development Programme’s ”people- driven” potential for fundamentally changing a society in danger of being swamped by a market- driven approach to growth and development.
The RDP Council is supposed to be a watchdog body, aimed at preventing just this. Comprised of formations of the alliance, trade unions and civics as well as sectors embracing women, youth, health, education, religious, environmental and human rights groups, it has so far been unable to make any significant impact.
A discussion document prepared for a recent national workshop of the council goes some way down the road of self-criticism. It notes that unequal power relations in society mean ”business and some sections of the bureaucracy continue to dominate policy formulation”. While the council had built links with government and parliamentary structures and it was important these continued, the council had to be wary of ”setting ourselves up as gatekeepers, attempting to monpolise channels of communication” and ”becoming little more than a transmission belt for government perspectives”.
A Sanco campaign targeting banks wanting to evict people unable to meet their bond repayments is already underway: Mayekiso says about 49 000 homeowners could be at risk. Mayekiso said Sanco, with 3 000 urban and rural affiliates countrywide, was getting to grips with its lack of resources and the vacuum caused by its leaders entering government. Cosatu was doing the same, and common ideals were emerging between Sanco, Cosatu and the SACP. He expected ”a long-term relationship would develop out of the campaign against the banks”.
But Sanco’s campaign contains some — possibly fatal — flaws. Its leadership is weak, its strength on the ground uneven. In its campaign against the banks it is mobilising a group of people who have defaulted on paying their bonds and who may merely be seeking an easy way out.
The depth and moral coherence of civic struggles in the Eighties is lacking. By encouraging a culture of non-payment, Sanco is threatening the government’s housing programme and setting itself at odds with the ANC.
Bond and Mayekiso note that ”even with strong traditions of social justice, recent memories of insurgent politics and comrades in government offices, there is too little talk of concrete socialist principles, policies, programmes or projects in the strategic sessions of either movement activists or leftist policy tanks”.
The coming months, as flesh gets put on the bones of government’s macro-economic policy, will see the debate heat up and the political contradictions sharpen. The irony is that, for the moment, a more cogent challenge to neo-liberal economics is emerging not in South Africa, but from within Zapatista headquarters in the jungles of Mexico.