The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has come up with a plan for workers to take control of the tripartite alliance and the African National Congress.
The plan is contained in a draft document called Programme for 2015. The Mail & Guardian is in possession of parts of the document, which will be debated at the federation’s eighth national congress in September.
Cosatu disclosed the existence of the plan at a press briefing this week but did not divulge its contents.
The plan comes amid reported fears within the ANC leadership of a working-class political takeover of the country. The alliance partners have held debates in recent years during the ANC’s sessions on strategy and tactics about which class should be the ”motive force” (catalyst) of change.
The trade unions and the South African Communist Party have consistently pushed for the working class to be the leading ”motive force”.
The last ANC conference, in Stellenbosch, settled on the working class being named as one of the ”motive forces”, as the party believes that all sectors of society have a role to play.
The plan is unlikely to go down well with ANC leadership structures. The ANC’s chief strategist, Joel Netshitenzhe, has said in the past that plans for a worker takeover underpinned recent problems in the tripartite alliance.
Addressing the Joe Slovo memorial seminar organised by the SACP earlier this year Netshitenzhe said ANC members believed there was an attempt to force the party into becoming ”socialist” and to prevail on the government to adopt socialist policies. Socialism was not the historical mandate of the ANC. Netshitenzhe said socialist principles could only be adopted in South Africa once it had reached a suitable stage in the revolutionary process.
Several ANC leaders, among them President Thabo Mbeki, have, in the past, also attacked the ”ultra-left”, including leaders of the SACP and Cosatu, for undermining the ANC-led government.
Cosatu’s plan will ignite debates on the ideological direction of the movement. Central to the plan is that workers ”should not throw the ANC into the sea!” but rather take control.
The federation is disgruntled by the fact that all the members of the alliance do not operate on a ”principle of formal equality”. The document says the alliance is regarded ”only as cannon fodder for mobilisation during the elections”.
”The ANC is the workers’ organisation and workers should not hand it over to the bourgeoisie on a silver plate. Above all, we recognise the displacement of the working class leadership of the National Democratic Revolution is temporary, a result of our failure to tilt the balance of forces and manage contestation within the alliance. But the balance of forces is not static. Rather, it is the subject of struggle. Our 2015 plan must help define how we can take that struggle forward,” the document reads.
It says Cosatu’s plan was put in place because ”the alliance has not provided a forum where parties could develop substantive agreement on any matter, least of all economic and social policy”.
”It has become clear that the state will not necessarily abide by agreements within the alliance — or for that matter, even ANC resolutions. During the GDS [Growth and Development Summit] negotiations, for instance, government officials resisted including commitments to halving unemployment by 2012 and to avoiding job losses in restructuring the state — both included in resolutions from the ANC’s 51st conference. Similarly, contrary to ANC resolutions, officials have consistently delayed convening meetings under the National Framework Agreement on state-owned enterprises.”
The document says Cosatu’s experiences with the Ekurhuleni and growth summits have been similar: ”Follow-up meetings never materialised. Again, the delays appeared super- ficially as a failure to find space in diaries — but fundamentally, it results from the balance of forces today.”
Cosatu general secretary Zwelin-zima Vavi said this week: ”The 2015 plan proposes concrete steps to develop a working-class leadership in this contested terrain.”
The Cosatu plan document says when the alliance was formed Cosatu recognised the ANC’s leadership role, assuming the alliance would form a ”political centre, a high-powered revolutionary council to give a voice to the majority. Through this centre, the alliance would discuss the challenges we face and plan how to shift the balance of forces.”
This type of alliance does not exist, says the document, and ”if we are to be honest, will not emerge in the foreseeable future. The balance of forces in the alliance today favours those who want only a limited role for the alliance and, indeed, the ANC itself.”
The Cosatu plan continues: ”Once elections are over, we go back into a painful reality for five years. All too often Cosatu’s letters do not even get the courtesy of a response, and we are routinely told that ‘government must govern, there is no dual power, there is no co-determination, and Cosatu must not treat the alliance as a bargaining chamber,’ etc.”
Vavi said the workers would ”mobilise for a decisive ANC victory” in the 2004 election ”so that in return the next government can tilt the balance of forces in favour of the working class”. It is understood that the delegates at the conference will debate whether support to the ANC should therefore be conditional.
Cosatu president Willie Madisha pointed out that the federation would monitor the records of elected representatives on issues of importance to workers and actively support only those with good records.