DREW FORREST and GLENDA DANIELS, Johannesburg | Friday
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.
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Briefing notes on the Alliance
The ANC document in review:
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Cosatu summit feeds into an alliance ‘war’
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Manuel in overdrive
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A ‘tendency’ to displease the ANC