For months Congress of South African Trade Unions leaders had billed this week’s three-yearly national gathering of the federation in Midrand as a watershed. Cosatu leaders said the gathering would consolidate the working class outside its ranks and put workers in charge of South Africa’s transformation.
Predictably the congress was preceded by militant rhetoric from Cosatu affiliates and tough talk from its leadership. Predictably also, the congress involved the usual climb-down on contentious resolutions and a pledging of undying love for the African National Congress.
Perhaps the federation protests too much — its leaders know full well that the relationship with the ruling party is symbiotic. Cosatu leaders are acutely aware that breaking ties with the ANC would probably splinter the federation. They know that their members are loyal to the ANC, probably more passionately than to Cosatu itself.
Conflicting loyalties probably explain the patchy response to last year’s anti-privatisation strike. The leadership is aware that many trade unionists double as ANC leaders at community level — indeed, that at community level little distinction is made between the three elements of the tripartite alliance. They also know that they have no alternative but to back the ANC in elections, as no other parliamentary political party more closely represents their interests. But Cosatu’s bond to the ANC should not be an exclusive one. The point that Cosatu is missing is that it does not just represent its own membership or simply the “working class”, classically defined. As the most organised and politically conscious formation in South Africa, it should see its role as being the key mobiliser of civil society.
The onset of democracy saw the rapid decline in activism and loss of interest by citizens in organisational politics. Popular demobilisation, in turn, led to arrogance among elected officials and a growing distance between institutions of governance and the people. It also meant that the representative creations of the new order — school governing bodies, community policing forums and ward committees — have not really taken off, particularly in deprived areas.
Mushrooming in the place of the disciplined and politically sophisticated civil society formations that arose in the 1980s have been a multitude of movements, sometimes sincerely pro-poor, sometimes opportunistic. While these movements have been a welcome addition to our political constellation and have played a role in reintroducing the concept of “people’s power”, they often tackle essential community issues without political and material resources.
Cosatu must step into this gap and ensure that its members drive the revival of community involvement in civic issues. In this way its attempts to influence public policy will gain greater clout; it will also be able to win more significant material victories for South Africa’s poor.
The next three years must see Cosatu build on the momentum created by the Basic Income Grant coalition and the campaign for state anti-retroviral provision, and replicate this model in other areas.
A defining moment
Depending on what climbs out of the debris, the collapse of the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) Cancun talks could turn out to be a defining moment in world economic relations. It was a debacle of a quite different kind from Seattle, where violent anti-globalisation protests did the damage. At Cancun, deadlock was forced by an unprecedented show of unity by representatives of developing nations, who dug in their heels over moves by the trading giants of the North to further prise open their vulnerable markets. As The Guardian’s George Monbiot argues on page 21 of this edition, the concessions demanded by the rich world were simply not matched by what it offered in exchange.
The G21 is the first coherent Third World economic lobby group to crystallise out of any world body. Equally significant is the fact that at its head stands China, a burgeoning economic superpower whose standing and muscle were crucial to maintaining the solidarity of developing countries at the talks. The G21 represents more than half the world’s population and nearly two-thirds of its farmers, while accounting for about a fifth of total world agricultural production. Other key members are India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt and, as one would expect, South Africa.
The hope is that the unity forged at Cancun will hold up until the next WTO encounter, when it will assist the developing world in pressing for a more egalitarian global trade regime. Its key target is the agricultural protectionism of the North, particularly the high farmer subsidies paid by the governments of the US, Europe and Japan.
The danger is that, confronted with threats or inducements by the North, poor nations will break ranks and sign bilateral trade deals with Europe and the United States. In a typical response, the US hinted after the collapse of the Cancun negotiations that it may abandon the multilateral approach in favour of country-to-country deals.
But the rewards of continued solidarity are potentially enormous. At issue is not merely the trading practice of the wealthy nations, but the whole lopsided architecture of the global economy.