Drew Forrest
The fascinating African National Congress document targeting an “ultra-left tendency” in the labour movement and the South African Communist Party is the latest broadside in a decades-old battle in the South African left over the role of trade unions.
It revives conflicts in and outside the union movement in the 1980s between “populists” or “nationalists” who believed unions should be subordinate to the ANC in a struggle for national liberation, and “workerists” or “independent socialists” who favoured an independent labour movement with a worker-centred political agenda.
And although the document insists the congress movement has never experienced a “left” rebellion in its ranks, some of its rhetoric recalls the expulsion of a Trotskyist faction – including historian Martin Legassick -from the ANC-in-exile in 1975.
The thrust of the document, couched in Marxist jargon, is to accuse an ultra-left clique in the Congress of South African Trade Unions of trying to de-link labour and the ruling party, in order to wage “pure class struggle”, and create “a socialist united front” to “build socialism now”.
This, it argues, objectively serves the interests of the right and “counter- revolution”. “The tendency repeats almost word for word positions articulated by the political Opposition [the Democratic Alliance], in condemning what it calls ‘quiet diplomacy’ in Zimbabwe, and in demanding a state of emergency on HIV/Aids and the release of an unprocessed report on mortality statistics.”
The “tendency” is using South Africa as a base for “an adventurist, ultra-left offensive against the most powerful governments and social forces in the world, to bring about socialist revolutions … It will create conditions for the destruction of our movement and our national democratic revolution.”
The document punts the standard Marxist line that unions are not inherently progressive “especially in relation to wider issues of social justice” because they tend to serve the narrow wage- and work-related interests of their members. This is puzzling, given that Cosatu is also accused of pursuing a political agenda.
In a clear allusion to the “workerism” of the 1980s, it says currents alien to the traditions of the ANC have survived in the unions into the present.
These were expressed in a proneness to treat the tripartite alliance as a bargaining forum from which “maximum benefits must be extracted for [Cosatu] members”, and in the insistence on including certain clauses in the ANC’s election manifesto.
Pressures to assert its independence had led Cosatu to withdraw its office-bearers from the ANC national executive committee, “laying the basis for a tendency to see the federation as its primary political home”, the document complains.
“There are members of Cosatu who have no other political home than Cosatu, and would want to transform it into a platform to pursue particular political objectives.” They were a minority, but their views “are often expressed as official policy of the federation”.
The “tendency” proclaimed that the ANC had turned to the right, and was not a socialist organisation. One of its aims was to detach the SACP from the ANC, and prevail on the latter to see Cosatu as its “special ally”.
The document hints that Cosatu’s changing class composition partly underlies its political stance. It says it is increasingly dominated by teachers, nurses and civil servants “rather than the industrial proletariat”, which has “implications … in terms of concrete revolutionary experiences and ideological outlook”.
This is a veiled tilt at Cosatu leaders like president Willie Madisha, a former teacher whom ANC loyalists accuse of having little historic connection with the ANC. But it also reflects ongoing conflict between the government and public service unions over restructuring and wages.
The document refers to tensions over how these “new unions as employees of an ANC government … should interact with programmes designed to transform the public service and build a developmental state”.