crossfire
Oupa Bodibe
Union investment companies have become the Achilles heel of the South African trade union movement, attracting claims that unions have moved away from their original purpose of representing workers and abandoning their socialist principles for an uncritical embrace of the market.
Dale McKinley’s article (“Unions on the capitalist bandwagon”, June 22) falls squarely within this analysis.
McKinley sees a general pattern of former progressive movements, from the African National Congress to the South African NGO Coalition to the Congress of South African Trade Unions, shifting towards an uncritical acceptance of the market as the arbiter of our destiny.
A curious distinction is drawn between strategic unionism and a socialist union movement. McKinley argues that the creation of union investment companies has placed the union movement on the self-destructive path of adopting the market in the vain hope of destroying it.
This verdict is reached via a shoddily constructed case. The author does not offer a coherent strategic path for the union movement to pursue. He oversimplifies the complex problems and challenges confronting the trade union movement and offers platitudes as deeper analysis.
This all reflects his notion of the South African revolution and revolution in general namely that there should be a “pure” socialist revolution without stating how that revolution should unfold.
Going into the transition, the union movement was faced with stark choices either militant “abstentionism” or strategic engagement.
Abstentionism would generate a feel-good atmosphere but would let other forces influence the direction of the transition. Such a path would not have changed the situation in favour of the working class.
Strategic engagement has delivered more to the South African working class than is generally acknowledged. The South African transition is a contradictory process characterised by clear shifts in areas of economic policy, combined with a commitment to pursue progressive social policy.
Cosatu has always critiqued these contradictions and has challenged government’s macroeconomic policy.
The challenge is not to wish these contradictions away but to understand their origins and implications for broader political strategy. On balance, the union movement has combined its militancy with engagement with broader political and socio-economic issues. To preach a politics of disengagement in the vain hope that this will deliver socialism is no strategy at all.
Union investment companies were an attempt to harness workers’ capital to change patterns of ownership in the economy and to channel investments in favour of working-class communities. Cosatu is the first to admit that the record on this score is mixed. But to use union investment companies as a barometer to measure unions’ political strategy and orientation is at best mischievous and at worst misleading.
The jury is still out on the impact of union investment companies on union strategy.
In certain circumstances the union has pursued a double agenda, protecting members while bidding to buy the company. McKinley is not the first to recognise this problem. He is right in contending that these companies need to be brought under political control and provided with a clear investment strategy that will benefit the workers.
Where he is wrong is to generalise by arguing that union investment companies have transformed the unions into lackeys of capitalism.
McKinley’s analysis of the union movement is based on unfair generalisations, which have not been tested in practice. His disdain of “strategic engagement” robbed him of the opportunity to articulate a clear strategy that must be followed by the working class in pursuance of its goal to attain socialism.
Oupa Bodibe is coordinator in the Congress of South African Trade Unions secretariat
@Life’s too short to play by the rules
BODY LANGUAGE
Jeanette Winterson
I love Joan Collins. While 1970s feminists were wondering whether all men were rapists and all sex was power, Collins was out there, ball-breaking in her stilettos, looking like a Playboy centrefold and maddeningly in charge.
Collins is a bridge between Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. Sexuality is her stamp and it’s not just the shoes. Yet she has none of the manipulated passiveness of Monroe. Collins stood for sexual freedom, even though it landed her in half-porn movies such as The Bitch. She has worked through all the stereotypes: happy marriage, broken marriage, fulfilled mother, sex goddess, vampire, porn pin-up, tabloid whore, cradle snatcher, stage luvvie, and always she emerges as Joan. Not a cinema creation or a pill-popping wreck, Collins continues to become herself.
Now, at 68, she has ended a 13-year relationship to start again with Percy Gibson, a theatre producer, aged 35. Fantastic. Forget the bus pass and the support stockings. Collins is reinventing herself a trick that few women learn. Monroe never managed it. Madonna has been much smarter. Reinvention is the only way to survive.
Reinventing yourself is not some sinister data-dissolving process where the past is wiped like an unwanted file. The past comes with you. It is self-knowledge, not self-denial, that allows people to move forward. The classic mid-life crisis of abandoning everything is a gesture towards change that often goes wrong because the deeper questions remain unanswered. Reinvention is not about staying as you are but with a new job/house/wife. Reinventing yourself is mental, physical and emotional renewal.
Women find change difficult. We are supposed to be the still points in a turning world. Women are the ones responsible for family stability. Historically, women are the ones affected by change, not the ones who change things. And yet women’s bodies are subject to physiological change in a way that men’s are not. Similarly, women are vitally involved in their children’s evolution from savage to citizen. Women are intimate with change, but when it comes to changing ourselves, we are afraid.
One of Collins’s favourite phrases is, “The greatest risk is not to take the risk.” One of my favourite phrases from, er, The Passion (sorry, folks) is, “What you risk reveals what you value.”
Right now our world is obsessed with eliminating risk whether it’s school trips or genetically modified food. We want guarantees with everything, even though none of us can be protected from ourselves. We try, though. Women try harder than most. We don’t listen to that little voice inside, or to our dreams. When something really big happens, we call it fate.
One of the heartening things about Collins’s own description of her new love affair is how honestly she takes responsibility for it. It’s not fate it’s what she wants. She is dignified, aware, and in control. Oh, and not for her the subterfuge of hotel rooms she doesn’t believe in deception. When Collins fell for Gibson, she told her partner how she felt. Those who find this heartless should remember that sex isn’t power deception is power.
Of course, a 68-year-old woman with a 35-year-old lover is unusual. We hardly notice the armies of pensioned-off males with their retinue of blonde mistresses, but for a woman an age gap is still seen as an obstacle to happiness. Women are supposed to be less interested in physical beauty than are men. I doubt the truth of this. Women are conditioned to overlook sagging bellies and slack muscles in favour of economic and social power. Collins has all the money and clout she needs, so she goes for the man she wants no compromises.
Fine if you’re a celebrity? Think of her as role model instead. What would it be like if women desired freely, untrapped by gender assumptions or economic necessity? What would it be like if men looked at women as we really are, and not as supports or fashion accessories? Desire is liberating. It is one of the few experiences urgent enough to prompt change.
For many women, desire has been neutered. When I hear women talk about sex mattering less than other things, I wonder: have those women ever known what it is like to make love with someone who excites them?
Ask Collins. Life is too short to play by the rules and anyway, whose rules are they? If you want a lover, the time is now.