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southern africa / workplace struggles / opinion / analysis Wednesday March 28, 2018 01:14 byJonathan Payn

On 17 November 2017, the Minister of Labour announced the state intends to carry out a new round of attacks on workers and their rights. The attacks come in the form of three Labour Bills currently being considered by parliament: the Basic Conditions of Employment Bill, the National Minimum Wage Bill and the Labour Relations Amendment Bill. If passed, the changes to the labour laws these bills propose will be a major attack on workers’ rights, won through decades of struggle, and will further deepen and entrench inequality and roll back important democratic gains.

Government claims the bills are intended to reduce the number of protracted, unprotected and so-called violent strikes. The fact, however, is that these bills are designed to restore and increase bosses’ profits, severely hit by the ongoing economic crisis, and attract foreign direct investment by providing ultra-cheap black labour and limiting workers’ ability to strike in defense of their rights and interests.

Two of the most important weapons that workers have to defend themselves against the ruling class and win better wages and conditions, and to advance struggles for other rights and needs, are the rights to strike and to organise around their interests independently of bosses and the state.

The proposed amendments to the LRA would further undermine the independence of unions and make it more difficult for workers to go on protected strikes through the introduction of a secret strike ballot, default picketing rules, compulsory arbitration and more cumbersome bureaucratic procedures before strike actions. This is an attack on the right of workers to make their own collective decisions about their organisations and about strike action without interference from bosses or the state. By increasing the conciliation period before workers can go on a protected strike from 30 to 35 days the amendments would make it easier for bosses and the state to undermine, delay, interfere with and prevent workers from striking. Moreover, although the LRA amendments are supposedly intended to prevent strikes from becoming ‘violent’ they do not address one of the main factors that cause strikes to become violent in the first place: the bosses’ use of scab labour.

The National Minimum Wage (NMW) and proposed changes to the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA) would take away important rights for some of the most vulnerable and exploited workers by phasing out Sectoral Determinations and replacing them with the NMW.

Sectoral Determinations currently set minimum wages as well as conditions of employment in a given sector. For example, the Sectoral Determination governing the farm work sector says that farm workers have the right to housing on the farms. If the Sectoral Determination is removed thousands of workers and their families could face eviction. Similarly, the Domestic Work sectoral determination prohibits bosses from charging a domestic worker more than 10% of their wages for accommodation. If the sectoral determination goes there is nothing to stop bosses charging workers anything they think they can get away with.

Moreover, the NMW does not actually set a monthly minimum wage. It only sets an hourly minimum wage of R20 per hour (R18 p/h for farmworkers, R15 p/hour for domestic workers and R11 p/h for public works, to be increased to R20 p/h by 2020) with a minimum number of four working hours a day. This means that workers that work less than 40 hours a week, such as those who work part time or flexible hours, might not even get the already inadequate R3 500 per month. This is not nearly enough to live a dignified life on and a slap in the face to the workers that died at Marikana for a living wage of R12 500.

While it is vital to resist the bills and defend hard-won workers’ and democratic rights we must remember that even now, while we do still supposedly have these rights – at least on paper – they are violated by the bosses and the state daily and millions of people still cannot access them.

This is not simply due to corruption, mismanagement, lack of finance or imperialist meddling etc., but is the direct result of the neoliberal war on the poor that the ruling class – black and white – has waged against the black working class in South Africa for four decades; first under apartheid and continued under the ANC. These bills are a clear example of how the ruling class uses the state to do this. And how what the state gives with one hand – such as the right to strike – it does so under duress, when the working class is strong and united, and will just as easily take away with another hand when it serves the interests of the ruling class and the working class is weak and divided. This is because the state is not neutral but an undemocratic institution of elite minority rule over the working class majority.

The struggle to guarantee human and workers’ rights for everyone, once and for all, and to meet their needs will necessarily have to be a revolutionary struggle against capitalism and the state to radically change the structure and purpose of the South African economy and the society we live in.

southern africa / miscellaneous / opinion / analysis Saturday March 17, 2018 21:59 byLucien van der Walt

This commentary, an input at a Globalization School debate in Cape Town, engages current labor and Left debates on building alternatives, drawing on the experiences of the radical wing of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and on anarchism and syndicalism. It argues for a strategy of bottom-up mobilization based on debate and pluralism, and building structures of counter-power and a revolutionary counter-culture that can prefigure and create a new social order. The aim is to foster a class-based movement against exploitation, domination, and oppression, including national oppression, that can win reforms through self-activity, unite a range of struggles against oppression, and develop the capacity and unity needed for deep social change. This should be outside parliament, the political party system and the state. The outcome, ultimately, would be the replacement of capitalism, the state, and social and economic inequality, by a universal human community based on self-management, the democratization of daily life, participatory economic planning, and libertarian socialism.

Lucien van der Walt, 2016, "Alternatives from the Ground Up: Globalization School Input on Anarchism/Syndicalism and (Black) Working Class Self-Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa," “WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society,” volume 19, number 2, pp. 251-268.


**This is a lightly edited transcript of Lucien van der Walt’s input at the 2010 Globalization School in Cape Town, for the public debate “How Do We Develop an Alternative?” Co-panelists were Mazibuko Jara (Conference of the Democratic Left, now national secretary of the United Front), Zico Tamela (South African Communist Party, SACP), and Lydia Cairncross (Workers Organization for Socialist Action). It was very well received. Lucien van der Walt is a South African writer and sociologist, long involved in the working class movement. He is the author of numerous works, and editor of “Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940” (with Steven Hirsch, preface by Benedict Anderson, 2010/ 2014, Brill). The Globalization School is an annual event by the Cape Town-based International Labor Research and Information Group (ILRIG), attracting 150–200 activists from unions and social movements.


LvdW: I think the previous panelists have put forward some pretty powerful arguments. So, I must start by thanking these comrades. We are addressing the issue of “How Do We Develop an Alternative?” and, more precisely, at how unions and community movements can develop this alternative. And by that, of course, we mean an alternative to the existing system, which traps millions upon millions in misery.

We need to be very careful not to reduce our critique of the current system to a critique of the system for creating *poverty*, for not creating enough *jobs*, for not building enough *houses*. We must not forget that, originally, socialism stressed creating better material conditions for the working class, the peasantry, and the poor more generally (the “popular classes”) only *as a means to an end*, only as means to enable people to have *free, meaningful lives*.

Our disagreement with liberalism was not on whether people *should* be free; rather, it was that liberal solutions—free market capitalism and parliamentary democracy—were completely *inadequate* to the task of enabling ordinary people to have free, meaningful lives.

THE SOVIET MIRAGE

But this stress on freedom was lost with the rise to power of state-centered Left traditions, such as social-democracy from the 1890s and Marxist “communism” from the 1920s.

I know when the term “socialism” comes up, many in our movements will speak about the Soviet Union, or Cuba, as somehow “socialist.” A speaker on Monday, for example, said that the Soviet Union was a “work in progress”—but progressing in the right direction. That same speaker added that the working class would be “demoralized” if something happened to Cuba, which has a similar system to that which the Soviet Union had before its collapse, along with its satellite states in Europe and Asia, from 1989 to 1991.

But what we are really doing if we identify the Soviet or Cuban models with “socialism,” is saying that it is possible to have a socialist system where the working class does not have basic trade union rights, is subject to internal passports (or, as we knew them in South Africa, pass laws); that we can have socialism where the working class and peasantry are ruled by a small bureaucratic and political and economic elite—a ruling class minority—that terrorizes its opponents, and uses secret police, forced labor, and ruthless dictatorship; that we can have socialism where the popular classes are not, in fact, in power.

Well, if that is “socialism,” then socialism is completely pointless. And I know someone will respond: “But comrade, consider the material gains of the Soviet people, the lack of unemployment, the massive industrialization—and the great health care system in Cuba today.” But basic freedoms and human rights, and working class and peasant power, are not optional extras! If having jobs and hospitals or steel factories is what (p. 253 starts) counts in measuring “socialism” then there is nothing that makes socialism superior, in any way whatsoever, to a range of explicitly capitalist dictatorships.There were and are jobs and hospitals and steel factories under a range of capitalist, military dictatorships in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. But we do not call those socialist. Apartheid itself actively promoted heavy industry, and had less than 10 percent unemployment as well as continually expanding social services, until the 1970s. But we would never call it socialist.

Systems like the Soviet Union did not, and could not, deliver freedom and the opportunity for meaningful lives; they were systems of totalitarian state-capitalism. Freedom was not on the program. Having a red flag and citing Karl Marx and calling Cabinet Ministers “People’s Commissars” does not make one bit of difference if the basic social relations are exploitative and hierarchical.

VANGUARD PARTIES? SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC PARTIES?

And that is why I get uncomfortable when comrade Zico Tamela, whose background is in the SACP, talks in favor of Bolshevik vanguard parties, the seizure of state power and so on.

I agree with the comrade on the need for radical change. And I say that the SACP has heroic traditions, and we should respect and learn from those traditions.

But not uncritically! The SACP’s historic vision of socialism had very little “socialism” in it: its original reference point, the Soviet Union, was not socialist, but state-capitalist; and until the 1990s, the SACP ignored the dictatorship, repression, and the subjugation of the working class, peasantry, and poor that was central to the Soviet bloc. The SACP’s more recent reference point is social-democracy. Although this term is carefully avoided in SACP texts, the current project is effectively a social-democratic one: slowly reforming capitalism, through the capitalist state, and expanding the state bureaucracy.

Neither vision really deals with the key point that socialism should create freedom. Although social-democrats try to democratize society, they seek the impossible: to give capitalism a human face, using the state, and evolve it slowly into socialism. This is a *reformist* project—it seeks change through a series of reforms *only*—and it is a *failed* project, having collapsed worldwide by the early 1970s.

I am not confident that the SACP has a plan for change that will benefit the working class. And I also do not want to be ruled by SACP people like Blade Nzimande or Jeremy Cronin, given the heavy imprint on the party’s political culture of the Soviet Union model, with its stress on a top-down “vanguard” party model.

AFTER 1989: REDISCOVERING THE LIBERTARIAN LEFT

For me, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet model, while it was temporarily disorientating for the popular classes (especially the large sectors ( p. 254 starts) that mistakenly saw this model as socialist), also opens up new vistas, new possibilities, space to rediscover the soul of the socialist project. The end of an illusion is always disorienting, but illusions need to end.

Militants will remember how hard it was in the 1980s to talk about “socialism” without talking about the Soviet Union. How, if the Soviet leadership said or did something, the impulse was to cheer and to ignore all the problems, or to claim the system was basically revolutionary, despite some “degeneration” or “deformation.”

Without the continual presence of the Soviet-type regimes we can start to re-envision—or should I rather say rediscover?—the more libertarian and genuinely socialist ways of thinking about socialism, the ways outside of the mainstream Marxist and social-democratic traditions, and recover the core values of socialism. That Left project can again be fundamentally delinked from the mirages of the old East bloc, and the failures of Western social-democracy, again be relocated in radical democratic, libertarian Left traditions like anarchism and syndicalism.

DEMOCRACY FROM BELOW

Because really, socialism at its best, is also a critique of the *rule* of the many by the few. Not just a critique of the *exploitation* of the many by the few, not just a demand for a system in which people are not exploited. Not just a critique of the system for generating poverty.

It was, and is, also a critique of the *domination* of the many by the few, and of *multiple* relations of domination and *oppression* across society. It was, and is, about opposing people being impoverished, dominated, oppressed, not having dignity, about not having any real power in work, the neighborhood, the school.

Just to give a small example: when we look at the so-called “service delivery protests” in South Africa, it is easy to assume that these are just protests about getting more water, electricity, and plumbing, delivered from on high, at the convenience of politicians. But what people are actually highlighting is the simple, horrible fact that they have to blockade roads, confront town councilors, even damage property, just to get taps and toilets. This is an expression of the fact, the harsh truth that the common people exist in a disempowering system, where only protest, sometimes violent protest, gives the popular classes a *voice*. Because between protests, the masses *are* voiceless, ruled from above, and ignored.

And if we look at exploitation as well, what makes this possible? Partly, yes, working class people have no real choice but to work for wages: owning no productive resources, they must sell their labor-power. But at the workplace, it is *domination* by the employers, both private and state employers, through their apparatus of supervision and punishment, that actually *enables* exploitation by controlling movement, time, and energy. ( p. 255 starts)

TO LIVE FREE, MEANINGFUL LIVES

If we want to seriously talk about alternatives to capitalism, we need to think about much more than more jobs and hospitals and steel factories: important as these are, they are not socialism. We need to think beyond the Marxist regimes and social-democratic and capitalist models of the twentieth century, rejecting all models that manifestly failed to meet the most basic criteria of working class and popular class power, dignity, autonomy, and freedom. We need to think about much more than just changing the political parties in office.

We need to think of radical, dramatic change—a social rupture, not just a series of modest reforms in the existing order. It is better to have a bigger cage, but it is still a cage. *Reforms are valuable, but reformism is a dead end*. It is essential to link reforms to a larger project of accumulating power and ideas for a revolutionary change in society.

This is why I like the point that my co-panelist comrade Mazibuko Jara of the independent Left was making, that we need to think about how socialism can change *everyday life*. That we need to think of socialism as a project that will *empower* the mass of the people—and therefore, I would say, as something very different to the old Soviet model, as well as something very different to the social-democratic model, which retains capitalism and bureaucratizes society.

RESOURCES FOR CHANGE: 1980S SOUTH AFRICA

In rediscovering the progressive, emancipatory, Left and working class project, we can start by rediscovering other paths that were opened by our own struggle in South Africa.

In the 1990s, we took the path of elections and state power. Our movements, including the SACP, decided to put the African National Congress (ANC) into parliament—the idea was that we would then “engage” the ANC, “contest” the ANC, and try to get it to implement pro-working class policies. This approach has also been pretty much the program of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a program some have called “radical reform” or “strategic unionism.” The labels sound very impressive, but amount to a social-democratic project. This project was a key rationale for establishing, in the early 1990s, the formal “Tripartite Alliance” between the ANC, COSATU, and the SACP, which continues today.

This project has not worked; capitalism and the state and the ANC were impervious to social-democratic interventions, and the Alliance seems impervious to policy proposals by the SACP or COSATU. If anything, the Alliance is used by the ANC to control COSATU and the SACP. The social-democratic project is here, as elsewhere, dead in the water. Only struggles seem to make the state listen.

The big path that we abandoned in doing this was the path opened up in the 1980s, of the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the radical “workerist” ( p. 256 starts) Federation of the South African Trade Unions (FOSATU) at their best. These formations insisted that rather than be exploited, oppressed nationally, and disempowered, oppressed people should rather create *democratic organizations autonomous of the state*, through which to run their own lives and rebel, and *accumulate through these, the might to overthrow the regime*, and capacities that could *lay the basis for a new society*.

The UDF called this “people’s power.” FOSATU called this “workers’ control.” Here, democracy was not something that happened at elections, or through lobbying parties through structures like the Alliance, or through proposing policies through corporatist structures, but something built *right now*, in struggles and organizing. A new South Africa and a new nation *built from below*, from *outside* the state, and *by, primarily, the working class and the poor*. Thus, the UDF insisted (Morobe 1987, 40):

“By developing active, mass-based democratic organizations and democratic practices in these organizations, we are laying the basis for a future democratic South Africa. When we speak of majority rule, we do not mean that black faces must simply replace white faces in parliament.

“A democratic solution in South Africa involves all South Africans, and in particular the working class, having control over all areas of daily existence—from national policy to housing, from schooling to working conditions, from transport to consumption of food. When we say that the people shall govern, we mean at all levels and in all spheres, and we demand that there be real, effective control on a daily basis.”

ELECTORAL ILLUSIONS REMAIN

But in the 1990s, we put our faith into elections, into parties. The UDF was closed, its remnants turned into ANC structures. COSATU was re-geared as an Alliance partner for the ANC. And we never got anywhere near a situation of “all South Africans, and in particular the working class, having control over all areas of daily existence.”

Now, large sectors of the working class and the poor are waking up and seeing that the ANC cannot be fixed. But most, including most on the Left, have not recognized that the *whole system* is the problem. Most do not see the basic fallacy of using elections and lobbying political parties—they reject the ANC, but put their hopes in a new or a different party, like a workers’ or Left party of some sort.

What gets lost is the simple fact that all successful electoral parties become part of the capitalist state—and therefore, enemies of the people. If the ANC of Nelson Mandela—which rose on the back of the massive struggles and movements of the 1980s and which was watched with awe by the eyes of the whole world—failed to be different, why would any other party succeed?

The ANC is not the problem. *The system is the problem*. And it cannot be fixed. (p. 257 starts)

RULING CLASS—NOT CAPITALIST CLASS

But why do I say the state is *always* anti-working class?

When we talk about the ruling class, we often seem to think that the ruling class is a bunch of rich white capitalists in Constantia in Cape Town or in Sandton near Johannesburg, the owners of private capital. And yes, they are part of the ruling class! But while it is correct to highlight the power of the (economic) elite that sits atop the private corporations, a focus on these completely fails to take into account the state (or political) elite that sits atop the state machinery, whose power resides in state institutions, including the army and the bureaucracy (and the state corporations). There are the people who run the state: minsters, directors, mayors, parliamentarians, vice-chancellors, generals. Their power rests not on private economic resources, but in the organizations they control.

Capitalists are only *one* part of the ruling class. The ruling class is a minority, its power rests on two institutions that centralize power and wealth so that this minority can rule the majority, the popular classes. And these two institutions are the corporation and the state, which share the basic features of top-down rule by and for an elite, exploitation of workers, the priority of ruling class interests.

These two institutions are interdependent, bound together, by these imperatives: the ongoing subordination and exploitation of the popular classes. There is a *single ruling class* that comprises those who own or control the means of production through private (and state) companies, plus those who own or control the means of administration and coercion, mainly through the state apparatus.

RESOURCES: LIBERTARIAN SOCIALISM, ANARCHISM, SYNDICALISM

Another set of important resources to be drawn upon in rethinking socialism can be found in the tradition of anarchism and syndicalism, which is the main expression of libertarian socialism, of anti-authoritarian socialism.

This is against hierarchy and social and economic inequality. Its critique of capitalism arises from these positions. It is for participatory and democratic decision-making wherever possible, including in the workplace, and in the larger economy, through measures like self-management and participatory planning, as well as in neighborhoods, schools, and other sites. It is for the democratization of daily life, and about democracy in all possible areas.

And, because this tradition understands the state as an institution that shares basic features with corporations, and as fundamentally bound to the corporations at all times, and as beyond any possibility of capture by the popular classes, its position is anti-statist. *It does not see the state as the solution, but as part of the nexus of ruling class power*.

It argues that it is pointless having a revolution if you keep any system of domination, hierarchy, oppression or exploitation. That is not really a real (p. 258 starts) change in society: it is a change in the masters, but not freedom for the slaves, the basic system of people dominating, oppressing, and exploiting each other remaining.

SELF-MANAGEMENT, SELF-GOVERNMENT

Other speakers on the panel have spoken about the need to capture the state, or to stand Left candidates in elections.

But as I have argued, the state cannot be captured by the popular classes, used by the working class, because it is a centralized institution of minority class rule, inextricably allied to the private corporations. This means that any workers’ or left-wing party, aiming at state power, is a dead-end, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter its size, no matter its program or rules.

And that is why I take the UDF and FOSATU approaches, as well as anarchism/syndicalism, as key references in thinking about how we build an alternative—not because these are perfect, but because these stress a different way of doing things, “people’s power” and “workers’ control.”
Because these aim—at their best—to build popular *self-government outside*, even *against* the state, and *outside*, even *against* party control, by *popular resistance, building a future* based on deep-reaching changes in social relations.

And that it’s only by creating a new society, from below, through the struggles and movements of the popular classes that we can move to new social relations. This is completely different from the dictatorial system that existed, for example, in the Soviet Union, completely different from the bureaucratic social-democratic welfare state that existed, for example, in Sweden, completely different from the passive politics of elections.

Let me be clear here that I am not claiming that modest changes in daily life and more democratic ways of doing things now, suffice to change society. A new society based on self-management and self-government can only be created through ongoing, escalating class struggles, and will ultimately require the transfer of means of administration, coercion, and production into the hands of the popular classes. And that will ultimately involve a radical rupture in the social order, not a slow process of gradual transition or mass “exit” from the existing order.

Rather, it involves building organizations of *counter-power*, organizations that *counter* the power of the ruling class in immediate struggles, but that can eventually can take power, *displacing* ruling class power, displacing the top-down system and *replacing* it with a bottom-up system that we build from below. This system of “people’s power” and “workers’ control” is built now, day-by-day, block by block, factory by factory, mine by mine, office by office—and it prefigures, as the UDF and FOSATU understood, a better future

*Power is not abolished here, it is taken. But not by a party, not by an elite, but by the great majority of society.*
( p. 259 starts)

BUILDING TOMORROW TODAY

A key principle that I want to extract from these two reference points—the UDF and FOSATU, and anarchism and syndicalism—is the importance of linking the *methods* of struggle to the *outcomes* of struggle. The way that people struggle now, is going to shape what they get in future.

There is no Chinese Wall between how people struggle, and what people get. The one shapes the other. Fighting through state elections, for example, means organizing to elect elites to deliver—at their convenience—some changes, from above, through the state. Building organizations based on authoritarian leadership, demagogy, and manipulation is a direct route to a Promised Land based on authoritarianism, demagogy, and manipulation.

If we organize democratically, and in a participatory way wherever possible, then we train ourselves in democratic practices, and we keep power in our own hands; we do not create, from within our movements, a new elite that will hijack our struggles. The way that struggle is conducted is extremely important.

*How* we fight shapes what we get: building this future also means building a unified popular class movement *now*, across the barriers and the borders, rejecting the idea that different sections of the popular classes are enemies of one another. Like FOSATU, the UDF insisted that a movement fighting for a society based on justice, including racial equality and national liberation, must include people on the basis of their willingness to fight unconditionally for progressive change, rather than exclude people on the basis of their race or nation, which they cannot choose. The enemy was framed as a particular social system, rather than as particular races or nations. Thus, the UDF (Mosiuoa Lekota, quoted in Neocosmos 1996, 88):

“In political struggle ... the means must always be the same as the ends ... How can one expect a racialistic movement to imbue our society with a nonracial character on the dawn of our freedom day? A political movement cannot bequeath to society a characteristic it does not itself possess. To do so is like asking a heathen to convert a person to Christianity. The principles of that religion are unknown to the heathen let alone the practice.”


This stress on prefigurative thinking means, above all, an end to instrumentalist approaches. All too often, movements think in terms of how best to get “the masses” to a march, about how many heads can be counted. But bussing people to events they do not control is not building an active, self-governing movement. It is about turning people into spectators, or clients.

There is nothing to be gained from such methods, if the aim is self-emancipation. So, our movements have to be vigilantly, ruthlessly democratic. Let me stress here that this requires
*formal organization*:
there must be clear procedures, mechanisms of accountability, and decision-making systems in place. Informal relations and processes are a recipe for cabals and powerful individuals to take control and manipulate. And while consensus-based decision ( p. 260 starts) making can be useful, it easily turns into a means for stubborn minorities to veto majorities, effectively controlling decisions. Majority-based decision making is often more democratic.

LIMITS OF THE 1980S: INTOLERANCE

Which brings us to important lessons that need to be drawn from the failures of South Africa’s 1980s.

On the plus side: the broad working class built radical structures—street committees, civic/area-based structures, self-defense units, parent-teacher-student committees—exemplified by UDF affiliates and stressing “people’s power” as a method of organizing, and as a way of transforming society; and a radical union movement—based on assemblies, committees, and solidarity— exemplified by FOSATU and the early COSATU, and stressing “workers’ control” as a method of organizing, and as a way of transforming society.

On the negative side: all too often, ideas and practices undermined the principles and potentials of these great efforts. All too often, only one political line was permitted in the community-based structures: other currents were not allowed to participate, rival currents denounced as traitors, collaborators, and counter-revolutionaries. Many structures became “owned” by a party—normally the ANC. This happened throughout the UDF. By the late 1980s, COSATU was also becoming ANC territory, ANC-only. And ANC was not the only one that did this; all the nationalist parties had this impulse.

This undermined, weakened, corrupted the bottom-up structures of “people’s power” and “workers’ control.” Street committees sometimes degenerated into street terror; mass mobilization and careful education were sometimes replaced by forcing people to join campaigns; an anti-apartheid approach was often simply a code for blind loyalty to one party, sometimes violently enforced.

Such practices have cost the popular classes heavily, opening the door to the blind, even paranoid loyalty to certain political parties that we see today, to the intolerance of criticism that we see today in the ANC and in COSATU. That is the legacy of the failings of the 1980s.

FOR DEBATE AND PLURALISM

Instead of this closing down of space, we need to enable *political pluralism* in our organizations: many views, open debates, and issues decided on their merits, not on personalities and not through cabals. This builds stronger movements, *and* it is essential to any project of building a bottom-up, freedom-based alternative, both in the present and for the future.

Not all views are correct—but let us debate them, not suppress them; let us be tolerant of difference, willing to listen. Let us also avoid the debating tactics and styles that close down real discussions, like labelling people, like dismissing theory as “dogma,” like using jargon. (p. 261 starts). And let us realize that a future society, governed from the bottom-up, also has to ensure political pluralism, and avoid the temptation to close debate and contestation in the name of “saving” the revolution.

If revolution—this what the radical rupture of which I spoke means, a class-based revolution—is to occur, it is about replacing domination, exploitation, and hierarchy with a radically democratic social order: self-management, self-government, collective property, classlessness, and statelessness.But since the aim is maximize freedom, efforts to save the new society by *closing* down freedom will kill the revolution from within—just as surely as any external counter-revolutionary threat. This is the genesis of Soviet Union-type regimes: genuine revolutions were killed from within, by self-declared vanguards claiming to “save” the revolution.

LINKING DIFFERENT STRUGGLES

Another principle that can be drawn from FOSATU, the UDF, and anarchism/syndicalism, is that most of the struggles that are being fought by different parts of the popular classes—whether around health issues, or gender equality, or job loss, or even municipal demarcation for that matter—are largely responses to a *common system*; they are *different fronts* in the class struggle. A great many of the problems we face have roots in a *common system*. And those that cannot be reduced to that system, are intensified, worsened, by that system.

The UDF, for example, was able to link the fight against racist, oppressive laws to fights around wages, rents, and education, and capitalism, framing the main enemy as apartheid. FOSATU, for example, linked struggles for union rights to fights over control of production and efforts to mobilize working class neighborhoods, framing the main enemy as racist capitalism.

The enemy is not corrupt individuals, or a particular party, or individual, or group, but a *class system* centered on a ruling class. Now if there is one main enemy, it is possible then to think of building a common working and popular class front, a *revolutionary front of the popular classes*.

WHY A CLASS-BASED APPROACH?

What FOSATU (with its stress on working class power) understood better than the UDF (which aimed at a multiclass nationalist front, including the “progressive” bourgeoisie) was that *only the popular classes can bring about the deep, radical changes needed to ensure the complete class and national emancipation of the majority*.

Why a class-based movement, and a revolutionary front of the popular classes?

Because only oppressed classes, which do not exploit, have the numbers, power and interest in creating a new, classless, stateless, society. Exploiting classes cannot end exploitation; ruling classes cannot end class rule. So making (p. 262) alliances with sections of the ruling class, even “progressive” sections, as the UDF did, means accepting class society.

Class provides a basis to unify people across the divisions like race, culture, nationality, and gender, around common interests. It enables the struggle of the popular classes against an oppressive system that generates multiple oppressions and inequities—not a struggle against individuals or against specific racial or ethnic groups. And without unity along a class axis, society fractures easily into all-sided conflicts, from which no progressive outcomes are possible. The cases of Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda in the 1990s show what horrors such fracturing can generate.

So, I like the point that comrade Zico was making about revisiting about the option, raised in COSATU and in the SACP, of forming a broad *working class* front, rather than a multi-class *national* [popular] front.

REVOLUTIONARY NATIONAL LIBERATION, ANTI-COLONIALISM

Also, so long as class systems remain, not only will most people remain exploited and dominated as members of the popular classes, but the class system will generate—or at least, worsen—other forms of oppression.

This means that even issues like racial and national oppression are difficult to resolve within class societies. As an example: the apartheid legacy, which is central to South Africa’s ongoing national question, cannot be resolved without a massive redistribution of wealth and power to the black working class. But this massive redistribution requires massive class struggles. The majority of the South African working class—black African, Colored, and Indian—is not just oppressed as an exploited and dominated class. *It is still oppressed on national (or if you prefer, racial) grounds*.

The apartheid system, and its segregationist and colonial predecessors, rested on the exploitation of the whole working class, white workers included, but its political economy centered on *cheap black labor*, what some call the “colonial wage.” Capitalist relations of production were intertwined with colonial relations of domination, and involved a battery of racist measures, extra-economic coercion, and urban and rural underdevelopment on racial lines, plus poisonous doctrines of white supremacy, which still scar our land.

And while today, we have a post-apartheid society, with a growing black elite, it is *still* a capitalist society. And that capitalist society still rests upon the ongoing national oppression of the black African, Colored, and Indian working class, on cheap black labor, *still* involves the continued power of the old apartheid-era “white monopoly capital” private corporations, and is *still* present in everyday life in the form of a deep apartheid legacy of fractured cities, low-grade education, electricity and other services in townships and rural areas, and racist thinking.

(p. 263 starts) And such a situation simply *cannot* be ended by a few reforms. It requires radical change, and *only* a working class movement—specifically, one centered on the black African working class—can make that radical change. Because that means a fight against the ruling class, both black and white, since the *whole* ruling class [black and white] rests on, benefits from, the system of cheap black labor.

PRIORITIZING THE OPPRESSED

So, let us be clear here: building a class-based movement, a revolutionary front of the popular classes, does *not*—as some critics suggest—mean *ignoring* issues that cannot be neatly reduced to class, like racial or national oppression. It simply means addressing these issues on a *class-struggle* basis, and linking them in the largest possible class front against *all* oppression.

Unions must be a key part of any class-based movement, any revolutionary front of the popular classes, as they have numbers and power—and above all, access to the workplaces, a crucial site of struggle. But the class front is more than a union front: it needs to bring together movements and struggles in a range of areas and struggles. And, as I have said, it also needs to bring together people with a range of views, meaning that it must have space for a range of ideas, for debates, and for tolerance.

It is possible and necessary to build a united movement, linking working class/poor communities, labor movements, and other sites of struggle, among them those of working class students. To build a common movement that fights on a class basis for the *general interests* of the popular classes, that at the same time gives a high priority to the *specific problems* faced by the *most oppressed* sections of the popular classes. A common movement that *prevents elite classes* from hijacking the struggles, and that is based on *anti-authoritarian, class-struggle principles*.

Let us take women’s oppression. I have been a member of the National Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU) in the past, and I remember in my union branch, 80 percent of the members were women but 80 percent of the leaders were men. And this was partly because of the specific problems women workers faced in society—a gender-based wage gap, discrimination, the dual burden of waged work and housework, gender-based violence, and so on—and also because of the gender stereotypes that comrades, women and men, brought into the union.

Now those are the sorts of things we have to challenge. *How* we build the movement, as I say, is very important. We cannot build a society where women are equals if we leave the fight against women’s oppression for later. It has to be waged now, as core to building and a revolutionary class politics.

AGAINST LABOR ARISTOCRACY AND “PRIVILEGE” THEORIES

This comes up, of course, against the claim pushed from a range of positions—including many nationalists and feminists, and some “identity politics” (p. 264 starts) currents—that insists that some groups in the working and popular classes benefit from the double or triple oppression that others face.

The *opposite* is generally true, as the divisions in the popular classes harm *all* sections, creating antagonisms, undermining conditions, and weakening organizations. (Leaving aside the special case of apartheid’s white working class).

Black immigrant workers in South Africa face severe oppression *as immigrants*, but who *benefits* from this? Not local workers, whose wages are undercut, but employers who get cheaper labor, and politicians who get easy scapegoats. Even if every immigrant was deported, mass unemployment would remain—a truth hidden by blame-the-“foreigner” thinking.

South African workers are not “privileged” in being free of this anti-immigrant oppression, they are harmed by it; and it is not a “privileged” position to not suffer every possible form of oppression and humiliation.

The solution is *not* to unite the popular classes on a crude “economistic” basis that ignores the specific, additional oppressions some sectors face. Rather, it is to build a *principled unity* that understands that the principle “An Injury to One is an Injury to All,” means *opposing all forms of special/additional oppression*, whether based on race, nation, gender, or whatever. But *through a common and united class-based movement*.

LIMITS OF THE 1980S: IDEOLOGICAL

Obviously elements of the approach I have outlined were absolutely central to the UDF and FOSATU. But just as obviously, the UDF and FOSATU never walked the path that they themselves opened, to its logical end point: a radical rupture and new social order, based on bottom-up democracy and a system of common property, without a state and without classes.

Why? It comes down to political ideas. The battle for change involves a battle of ideas. No revolutionary ideas? No revolution.

UDF structures, FOSATU structures, at their best, had the basic *structures* of a counter-power that, if more fully developed, expanded, and extended, could have helped displace and replace ruling class power. But *ideologically and politically*, they were eventually *flooded* by ideas, especially the ideas of the ANC and SACP, which prevented such outcomes. This included the ANC’s top-down tendencies, its intolerance of rivals, its politics of Messianic leadership, and its focus on getting state power. But even before the big revival of ANC and SACP influence in the 1980s, the ideas in the UDF and FOSATU were too *confused* to carry out a project of counter-power.

And this got us to where we are today. ANC ideas had a very good side— stressing non-racialism, anti-apartheid, rebellion, and social justice—along with a very bad side—a national alliance of *all* classes against apartheid, rather than class struggle; the aim of creating a reformed capitalism, rather than deep change; and the use of the state, rather than a direct transfer of power to the masses.(p. 265 starts)

And this led directly to what we have today: despite real gains in basic rights and welfare, and the abolition of apartheid laws, South Africa’s transition remains limited and frustrating, the legacy of the past remains everywhere in the present. The black elite, frustrated and humiliated under apartheid, segregation and colonialism, has largely achieved its national liberation. The black working class *has not*—and its fight for *complete national liberation* is being beaten back by the *whole* ruling class, black and white.

CHANGE THE MIND, CHANGE THE WORLD

So, changing the world requires building organs of struggle and developing these into *organs of counter-power*. But building counter-power has to be accompanied by a revolutionary shift in what people believe, that is, it involves building a mass-based *revolutionary counter-idea or counter-culture*.

The idea is the thing. Unless we have what Mikhail Bakunin called a “new vision,” a “new faith,” we will fail, as the UDF
and FOSATU failed. Here, comrade Mazibuko’s point about South Africa being a socially conservative society, despite its high levels of protests, is very important. Many people believe that the existing system is, in its essentials, fine, and that the system works, except that it’s abused by foreigners, or crooks, or politicians like current ANC head Jacob Zuma, or minorities, or young women on welfare etc. The idea of a bottom-up society is far from the minds of most people.

The South African state has maybe 159,000 police and 70,000 soldiers. Public order police are less than 7,000. At least 35 million South Africans are working class, but the working class—despite its vast numbers—does not move to a big struggle for decisive change. This pattern of containment is not a military issue.

What keeps the people down is *the soldier in the head*—who says we cannot emancipate ourselves, that we cannot possibly run society, that we cannot possibly have something different, better.

And that is why I am talking about the need to complement the battle for *counter-power* with the battle to build a revolutionary *counter-culture*, together countering the ruling class’s control at the ideological, cultural, and organizational levels.

THE NEED FOR AN ORGANIZED TENDENCY

Now, a political formation, based on clear ideas, a clear strategy, and disciplined unity, which aims to promote counter-power and revolutionary counter-culture is, in my view, *essential* to this project.

It can play a key role in conscientising people, in mobilizing, in organizing, in fighting the battle of ideas—but it must never be substituted for the self-activity of the popular classes, never assume direct power over the popular classes; it should act as a current within the masses, and aim at the leadership of the revolutionary Idea; and it must never enter the state. (p. 266 starts)

It can play a key role, if it aims to build counter-power and counter-culture, and facilitates and assists this building, if it fights to *democratically win the battle of ideas as a tendency within a pluralistic working class movement*, if it aims *at getting its ideas to be the leading ideas* to be implemented by the masses.

But a conventional political party? No thanks. These treat the movements of resistance as wings of the party, these place control in their own hands, these build within themselves new hierarchies and new elites, these aim to use the state, these enter into the state. They cannot achieve the goals of counter-power and counter-culture—in fact, they undermine them.

REFORMS FROM BELOW, NOT REFORMISM

As I stressed before, the state cannot be an instrument for working class power and freedom. The state institution, by its basic nature and its basic imperatives, must always place ruling class interests first.

Politically, this means that movements of counter-power and revolutionary counter-culture need to be movements *outside* of, and *against*, the state itself, not movements to launch parties, to lobby parliament, to tweak policies, but movements of struggle, bulwarks of the popular classes facing off against both state and capital—and aiming to replace them with something better—themselves!

This does *not* mean refusing to fight for reforms, it means fighting for reforms *through* counter-power. *And this means rejecting reformism but fighting for reforms in ways that build counter power/counter culture*.

States do sometimes make progressive reforms, but these reforms arise under the pressure of the struggles of the popular classes. Just as wage gains are primarily produced by campaigns and strikes, so are progressive changes in laws and policies.

*The reforms are concessions forced upon the ruling class*, the product of popular class power, imposed upon the ruling class through *struggles*. They are not the consequence of which party, leader, or faction is in state office at a given point. They have nothing to do with elections, policy lobbying, or corporatism.

Counter-power is, in fact, *built through fights for small reforms*. And even though these fights are for small things, these struggles also provide a basis from which to fight for bigger things, by building capacities, momentum, and confidence. So small strikes, small struggles are important, and lay the basis for big struggles. If people cannot win fights to keep the lights on, they cannot possibly win fights for deeper, more systemic, change. And it’s also in daily battles that people become most open to the radical ideas expressed in a revolutionary counter-culture.

“POLICY-FROM-BELOW”

This does *not* mean economism: as I said earlier, it’s essential to fight of a range of fronts, and to fight all forms of oppression.

This does *not* mean only dealing with narrow and immediate issues either, ignoring larger economic and social policy issues. (p. 267 starts) We have spent a great deal of time, especially in our unions, trying to propose alternative policies to the state, the ANC, the Alliance.

But these policies center on trying to tweak the existing system, and so, accept its framework. They try to control and fix capitalism—a system we do not control, and cannot fix—and rely on the state—an institution we do not control, and cannot control.

And these efforts have involved a top-down mode of politics where efforts are centered on making proposals at NEDLAC (National Economic Development and Labor Council), a corporatist body, or lobbying parliament, or the ANC’s National General Council. And they have involved developing very technical policies that most people in the unions and elsewhere do not understand— and, more importantly, played no part in designing.

And pretty much all of these policies have been completely ignored, so it’s all been pointless anyway.

Let me rather suggest that a movement of counter-power can engage in economic and social policy, but through tactics that I will call *policy-from-below*. Instead of policy as a technocratic exercise, we should use conflicts around policies proposed or developed by the state as a means of *movement-building*, of *campaigning*. This involves building campaigns in which our policies are developed *through mass movements and discussions*; not developed by a few experts at COSATU House or in a university or an NGO.

Let’s say the state is talking about cutting the Child Support Grant, the monthly cash transfer to poor parents. It is *not* the movements’ job to come up with an alternative state Budget so that the state can fund the grant more *effectively*. It is not the movements’ job to develop an alternative set of welfare and economic policies for the state, within the existing system, as if the problem is *not* also the state, not the *system*, but just bad policies.

Rather, from this perspective, it is the movements’ job to find the level of Child Support Grants that the working class *wants*, and to do this through participatory processes and discussions; and to use these discussions to raise larger issues around how society works, the distribution of wealth and power that favors the ruling class, the political economy; to educate the masses around these issues; to use these processes to build our organizations, to struggle for what we want. And to mobilize for the demands developed, and *impose* these on the state and capital through struggle.

The stress here is on direct action, mass mobilization, self-emancipation, and building counter-power and revolutionary counter-culture.

FROM RESISTANCE TO RECONSTRUCTION

Building counter-power/counter-culture requires a clear strategy for moving from resistance to reconstruction. This includes generalizing immediate and sometimes localized defensive struggles into larger battles, linking fights around wages and conditions to drives to standardize incomes and conditions and (p. 268 starts) universalize rights, unifying the popular classes including by fighting all forms of oppression, and accumulating capacities that will enable counter-power to take direct control over means of production, coercion, and administration— not just in one country, let me stress, but *internationally*.

The approach to struggle and policy-making that matches this strategy is *militant abstentionism*, that is, an insistence on our autonomy from the ruling class and our refusal to co-manage the bosses’ system. It does not aim to come up with any solutions for capitalism or the state, like alternative “people’s budgets” to the government, or industrial policy proposals through corporatism. In terms of workplace relations, it means building a union movement takes *no* responsibility whatsoever for capitalism or the state—that, instead, fights them.

IN CLOSING: TOMORROW IS BUILT TODAY

A new social order is the real solution to the multiple crises that wrack humanity and its planet. It will not emerge spontaneously, or from disconnected local struggles and experiments. It can build on the best of FOSATU and the UDF, but it needs to infuse ideas and insights from anarchism and syndicalism, and build a revolutionary class front.

It’s not an easy or quick approach, but there are no shortcuts. We need to engage in forms of protest and organizing and debate and ideas that empower, that break the commodity form, that break the power of the bosses in the factories, that break the power of politicians and elections, that enable national liberation, and that build the framework of a new world in the shell of the old.

**Lucien van der Walt is at Rhodes University, South Africa. He has published widely on labour and left history and theory, and political economy, and on anarchism and syndicalism. He is actively involved in union and working class education and movements.

REFERENCES
Morobe, M. 1987. Towards a People’s Democracy: The UDF View. “Review of African Political Economy” 40:81– 8.
Neocosmos, M. 1996. From People’s Politics to State Politics: Aspects of National Liberation in South Africa, 1984-1994. “Politeia” 15:73–119.

southern africa / miscellaneous / opinion / analysis Thursday March 08, 2018 05:57 byLeroy Maisiri

It’s been around 100 days since the birth of a “new” Zimbabwe: 37 years of authoritarian rule by Robert Mugabe ended when Emmerson Mnangagwa took power through a soft military coup . But what has changed, what we can we expect now? This paper argues that no deep changes are taking place. The slight liberalizing of political life and some promises of economic reform (good and bad) do matter. But the changes in the White House of Zimbabwe centre on removing one vicious state capitalist manager to make way for another, and will not bring liberation for the masses. This replacement does not address the problems Zimbabwe faces: a ruthless ruling class, a predatory state, crisis-ridden capitalism and imperialism. The problem is not individuals: the system is the problem. This paper argues against Mugabe and Mnangagwa, but also against the state as a form of social organization and against the idea that states can be used for liberating the people. All states oppress the working class, peasantry and poor, and the state in Zimbabwe is just an extreme example of how states are based on repression, corruption and promoting the interests of economic and political elites (the ruling class). It rejects the notion that Mugabe was a champion of the poor and landless, and the claim that his ousting was a defeat for progressive forces. But it has no illusions in Mnangagwa. True, real freedom will never come through parliament, or military take- overs, or old men who take turns to spout out neo-liberal or ultra-nationalist rhetoric, while their hands are covered in blood. It can only come from mass action and organising, the transformative engine to build real democratic, stateless socialism based on self-management, freedom political tolerance and common property (anarchism).


It’s been around 100 days since the birth of a “new” Zimbabwe. It’s been around a 100 days since 37 years of authoritarian rule by Robert Mugabe – Head of State since 1980 – finally came to an end. Zimbabwe has a new President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, who gained power through a soft military coup against Mugabe, and his chosen successor, Grace Mugabe. And recently, Zimbabwe mourned the death of former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, Morgan Tsvangirai: an opposition leader, he came from the trade unions, and spent most of his life fighting against Mugabe.

But what has changed, and what we can we expect now? This paper argues against the notion that deep changes are taking place. The slight liberalizing of political life (shown, for example, by Mnangagwa paying tribute to Tsvangirai) and some promises of economic reform (good and bad) do matter. But the changes in the White House of Zimbabwe centre on removing one vicious state capitalist manager to make way for another, and will not bring liberation for the mass of the people.

This replacement does not address the problems Zimbabwe faces: a ruthless ruling class, a predatory state, crisis-ridden capitalism and the power of imperialism. The issue is not around individuals: the system is the problem. This paper is anti-Mugabe and anti-Mnangagwa, but it is also anti- the state as a form of social organization. All states oppress the working class, peasantry and poor, and the state in Zimbabwe is just an extreme example. This paper holds the state of Zimbabwe guilty to the highest degree of restricting individual freedom and economic choices, of prohibiting a life worth living for ordinary citizens, and of promoting the interests of economic and political elites (the ruling class) at the cost of the masses. It rejects the notion that Mugabe was a champion of the poor and landless, and the claim that his ousting was a defeat for progressive forces. But it has no illusions in Mnangagwa.

Why an anarchist perspective helps


Anarchist theory helps provides us understand what is going on. It provides a holistic conceptualization of the state and its class. The anarchist approach explains how the state itself is not an instrument of democracy, but a pillar of the class system: it centralizes power and wealth, creating and giving space to minority rule and working with allied private capitalists. Changes in the personnel can affect policy and style, but not the system.

This is exactly what happened to Zimbabwe: the Mugabe dynasty was thrown out, but ruling class power has not been removed. In fact, there has not even been a change in the political party in office. Mnangagwa and Mugabe are from the same party, Zimbabwe African National Union- Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF), which has ruled the country since 1980. The take-over was the result of splits in ZANU-PF’s ruling group, which tore itself down the middle over who would replace Robert Mugabe. This resulted in a shift of power dynamics. The change was not from below, but through Mnangagwa using his power in the army against Mugabe’s power in the bureaucracy and police.

The self-defeating political culture


Robert Mugabe came into power in 1980, when the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) won the first open elections. Mugabe took over the party a few years before, and the party maintained a choke-hold on the country ever since. The 1980s saw unions repressed and rival parties attacked: the massacres by the ZANU-controlled army in Matabeleland from 1983-1987 killed 20,000 helped crushed the rival Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU). ZAPU was forced to merge into ZANU, now renamed ZANU-PF. By the early 1990s, ZANU-PF ran a business empire, imposed neo-liberal policies and engaged in widespread corruption.

Zimbabwe underwent massive political turmoil in the late 1990s. A lot of this was driven by unions, opposition groups and students fighting ZANU-PF repression and neo-liberalism. Ex-soldiers, frustrated by corruption in the pension system, and slow land reform were active. This was when Tsvangirai founded the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

However, the combination of systematic repression, opposition weakness (the MDC was consistently outmaneuvered by ZANU-PF), state propaganda, rigged elections, patronage and a controversial land reform programme allowed for ZANU-PF’s authoritarian nationalist government to keep power. Spontaneous land occupations had taken place for years: a desperate ZANU-PF, facing the MDC, hijacked the occupations, distributing the best land to its leadership and allies, and placing the rest under state control, to extract taxes and rent from small farmers – and trap them in patronage relations run by the party. Land reform also all but destroyed the section of the ruling class most opposed to ZANU-PF, the white capitalist farmers, who had replaced their earlier support for Mugabe with support for Tsvangirai.

Zimbabwe went through a process of rewriting its history, as all history became a patriotic history of Robert Mugabe, a personality cult, in which anyone against the regime – workers, students, peasants, poor people, MDC – were cast as traitors and imperialist stooges. As funding from Mugabe’s previous allies – the British imperialist government – dried up over the land reforms, Mugabe found new allies, eager for African resources – the Chinese government, now embarking on a big imperialist push in Africa. This has required giving China concessions and opening the borders for cheap Chinese imports.

In this situation, there has been major economic decline, with farming declining and local industry closing. Rather than end reliance on imperialism, ZANU-PF just traded imperialists. Very positive welfare and education reforms in the 1980s were gutted by neo-liberalism, then throttled by corruption and economic crisis, and massive unemployment – over 80% -- saw large parts of the working class forced into the informal economy. The largest union in the 1990s was the farmworkers union; today it is gone, and the largest union is that of street traders.

The predatory state and its problems


Zimbabwe had developed into a classic example of a predatory state, where control of the state apparatus by a small elite is central to accumulation by that elite, where that accumulation is based on extracting resources from society through taxes, nationalization and bribes, and where even private capitalist can only do business if they fill state offers. The large army plays a key role in this system, allowing the process to expand into nearby countries, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Zimbabwe joined the war.

Survival for the section of the ruling based on the state is linked directly to the massive exploitation and repression of the working class, peasants and poor, who have been hammered over the last decades, consistently economically, socially and politically beaten.
What this means is that the state is a core site for accumulation, and this means that fights for key offices and sections of the state are serious business. In Zimbabwe, the ruling class is now predominantly based on a largely black state elite, which has over time figured come to rely mainly on accumulating capital through state power. Losing office means losing access to wealth and power.

The coup has been celebrated as bloodless and it was met with joy by the masses, who came out in their numbers. But the trigger was not the masses, but a fight between two ZANU-PF factions. The forces used in the coup were not people power, but the means of coercion controlled by the state – more precisely, by a powerful group in ZANU-PF, the generals around Mnangagwa. It was after all the military that put Mugabe under house arrest, that was the first to occupy the streets, that took over all national (state) broadcasting and a general (Mnangagwa) prescriptively issued out the new vision of Zimbabwe. And it was through the same means of coercion that ordinary citizens were robbed of a chance to actually run and reconstruct a Zimbabwe that is reflective of their struggle. Once the army was used to settle the question of who would succeed Mugabe, the ordinary citizens were displaced once again, told to return to their homes, and to wait, that their future was once again in the hands of the state elite. And the new leadership of ZANU-PF was not so new: Mnangagwa was a long-standing ZANU-PF leader, who played a central role in the Matabeleland massacres.

ZANU-PF had, from the onset, used its control of means of coercion – the military and police – to consolidate the power of its leaders – who completely control the party apparatus – in order to hold state power, while using the means of administration – the state bureaucracy, including its control over land, licenses, education and media – to reconstruct Zimbabwe into ZANU-PF’s private property. This is not after Mugabe’s own image. This is not a simple matter: there were hard fights to prevent ZANU-PF losing control, and many of the measures that aid the ZANU-PF-centred state elite in accumulating wealth (like corruption and control over land) can cause serious economic problems. Generally speaking, ruling classes are based on economic elites (these days, normally private capitalists) and political elites (in the state), and these two sectors generally find common ground: in Zimbabwe, the crisis of the late 1990s saw the (black) political elite crush the (mainly white) economic elite; but the masses were always left out.

What does the new Zimbabwe need?


This is the cycle of official politics: occupying and taking over the state apparatus to generate transformative change, rather than putting power and wealth in the hands of the masses, the povo.

The ruling elite – in the old Rhodesia and then in Zimbabwe – has always been incapable of meeting popular needs. Decisions have been based on the benefits to the ruling class. The combination of an authoritarian reign, first under Ian Smith, then under Robert Mugabe, the power of the ruling class, the of coherent class analysis from the Left in Zimbabwe (which viewed the state as tool for revolutionary change), and the weaknesses of the unions allowed for Zimbabwe to be ZANU-PF’s foot stool.

True and real freedom will never come through parliament, it will not come through military take- overs, nor will it come through an old men who take turns to spout out neo-liberal or ultra-nationalist rhetoric, while their hands are covered in blood. True freedom for Zimbabwe lies on mass action, which is the transformative engine to build real democratic stateless socialism based on self-management, freedom political tolerance and common property (anarchism). As long as there is a single Zimbabwean who goes without food, who cannot afford education, who has no access to housing or employment, dignity then our fight has not ended. What is needed is to break out of the Mnangagwa illusion, and beginning to concretely organize among the masses of the people, for freedom and justice, and to clearly understand that the state is a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure that helps create the tiny ruling class that oppresses us all. It can be resisted but not used.

southern africa / miscellaneous / opinion / analysis Monday February 19, 2018 14:58 byShawn Hattingh

The article looks at the structural reasons why Ramaphosa replacing Zuma as the head of state in South Africa won't end corruption.

In South Africa, for white and international capital the last few weeks have been a period of rejoicing due to Ramaphosa being elected as ANC President. Zuma’s days as the State President are now also over. He was recalled by the ANC and in doing so he was forced to resign; leading the business elite to feel an even greater sense of smugness.

The bitter faction fights within the ANC, therefore, have seen Zuma defeated and his erstwhile supporters – a section of BEE capital and parasites in the top of the state - placed squarely on the back foot.

The slate that Ramaphosa won on was the promise to eradicate corruption within the state and the ANC. The tone that accompanied this was that Zuma would be removed from the Presidency and that he may even be prosecuted, along with the Guptas, for his role in ‘state capture’. The ANC itself is hoping that such moves will reverse its ailing fortunes and bolster its election campaign in 2019. Its alliance partners, the SACP and COSATU, are also opportunistically hoping Zuma’s exit from the state will give them a new lease of life politically; and that their leaders will be able to hold onto their cushy and ridiculously well paid jobs in the top echelons of the state under Ramaphosa, which were initially handed to them by Zuma for their backing in Polokwane in 2007.

The reality is that the battle within the ANC and now Zuma’s total demise has very little to do with addressing corruption – despite Ramaphosa’s claims. It was a fight for top positions in the state and the speed with which Zuma’s former die-hard supporters and allies, including the Ace Magashule and Malusi Gigaba, have quickly jumped ship since Ramaphosa’s victory has shown this. In the bid to secure their well-paying jobs going forward and to use positions in the state to secure business deals, old allies have been dumped and a new one, in the form of Ramaphosa, has been embraced.

Ramaphosa’s history highlights how his talk of tackling corruption within all structures of the state was and is simply a ploy, which has no substance. This is because Ramaphosa himself has been involved in corruption. Ramaphosa got rich overnight in the 1990s when he used workers’ pensions (supplied by union investment companies) to raise capital for his business deals. He was also supplied capital by white South African capitalists. To be sure, they were not buying Ramaphosa’s business acumen when they provided him shares, board positions and capital; they were buying the influence he had in the ANC and the state in order to further their own capital accumulation. All of this was backed by the ANC as it was expected that Ramaphosa would use his new found riches to boost the coffers of the Party.

Ramaphosa’s main business interest was Shanduka, which he was involved in founding in 2001. While in charge of the company, it was involved in cases of tax evasion as revealed in the Panama Papers. By 2012, as is well known, Ramaphosa was also a shareholder and Board member of Lonmin and he was the one that used his political connections to get the state to crush the strike, which saw the police gun down 34 workers at Marikana. Ramaphosa is not a man who, therefore, particularly shuns corruption or using connections to the state and political power to further his own vile money making interests or those of his business partners.

Likewise, his backers in the form of white capital are also not averse to corruption. Historically, their capital comes from colonial conquest and the state creating a pool of cheap black labour that could be exploited on farms, mines and factories through land grabs, hut taxes, pass laws, legalized racial discrimination and ultimately violence. In the apartheid era, the state also provided the world’s cheapest electricity to white capital and it paid handsomely for the sub-standard coal it bought from Afrikaner capital to fire Eskom’s power stations. Corrupt deals in the apartheid years, and there were many corrupt deals, built up white capital and were part and parcel of how business was done in those years – including transfer pricing, tax evasion and sanctions busting.

Even today, corruption is common practice in the private sector (still mostly in the hands of white South African capitalists). This has been shown through numerous leaks in 2017 and into 2018. For example, it recently surfaced that blue chip South African companies, such as Liberty and Illovo, have been using measures to evade tax on an ongoing basis. Not to be outdone, several South African financial institutions were of late caught manipulating the Rand in order to profiteer from the volatility created. Then of course there is Steinhoff that used Special Purpose Vehicles to fraudulently boost profits and lower debts on its books to the benefit of its shareholders and top management. When this became public knowledge, it was clear that the company was in reality in financial difficulties and its share price plunged at the end of 2017. Like Zuma, Steinhoff’s days may be numbered and it soon may disappear altogether. Nonetheless its shareholders, like Christo Weise, have got away with the ill-gotten gains and are unlikely to be prosecuted for the shenanigans that were taking place at Steinhoff.

White capital, therefore, has no problem with corruption. The problem they had with Zuma is that they were being side-lined in the corrupt deals of the state under his watch, with far more going to the Gupta family and a new BEE elite. Hence, they turned on the Zuma faction and backed Ramaphosa as their man: they wanted back in on the money, often involving corruption, which could be made through relations with the state and top politicians.

This means that corruption is not going to end under Ramaphosa’s tender. Making matters worse is the deal that was made in 1994, which saw the bulk of the private sector remaining in the hands of white capital. In return there would be some BEE, but more importantly the ANC leadership would be allowed to take over the state. In other words, capitalism would stay in place, including the harsh exploitation of the black working class on which it was and is based, but the faces in the state would change.

Since then, there has been some BEE, but it has been limited. As a result, white capitalists still mainly dominate the private sector. Aspiring capitalists that were linked to the ANC, who wanted to own large private companies, were and have been largely frustrated by these capitalists. In this context the state became the key, and in many cases the only, site through which an ANC elite could build itself into a prosperous black section of the ruling class – and corruption has been part of this structural problem.

The working class, in its bid to battle corruption, therefore need to be clear that the Ramaphosa regime won’t end corruption. It is a structural problem; and has nothing to do with good or bad personalities. New patronage networks will emerge, some old ones – including corruption at all levels of the state – will remain; although it will probably be less blatant and amateurish than under Zuma. Zuma and the Guptas will probably also be thrown to the wolves as a token; but corruption within the private sector and state won’t end. This is because corruption is a problem linked to the path that capitalist development has taken in South Africa.

If there is a serious bid to get rid of corruption, therefore, the structure and purpose of the South African economy would have to be fundamentally changed, which probably can’t be fully achieved under capitalism or the state system (which entrenches the rule and oppression of an elite minority over a majority and allows for corruption). Trying to end corruption, by definition, will have to be a revolutionary struggle to fundamentally change the society we have unfortunately inherited.

southern africa / the left / opinion / analysis Wednesday December 13, 2017 18:23 byLucien van der Walt, with Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich*

A lightly edited transcript of a presentation at a workshop hosted by the International Labour Research & Information Group (ILRIG) and the Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Centre in Drieziek extension 1, Orange Farm township, south of Soweto, South Africa, on 24 June 2017. It was attended by a hall full of community and worker activists, including veterans of the big rebellions of the 1980s.

South African ‘Workerism’ in the 1980s: Learning from FOSATU’s Radical Unionism

By Lucien van der Walt, with Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich*

This is a lightly edited transcript of a presentation at a workshop hosted by the International Labour Research & Information Group (ILRIG) and the Orange Farm Human Rights Advice Centre in Drieziek extension 1, Orange Farm township, south of Soweto, South Africa, on 24 June 2017. It was attended by a hall full of community and worker activists, including veterans of the big rebellions of the 1980s.
Thank you comrades for having me here. The Federation of South African Trade Unions is the focus of my talk. I want to look at what FOSATU stood for and what we can learn from FOSATU. When people remember it, they often label it as marked by “workerism,” and they take that as a bad thing. But I want to show the so-called “workerism” of FOSATU was very radical, that this radical South African “workerism” is very important to understand, and build upon, today.

I want to stress, at the start, that what I speak about here rests very heavily, not just on my research, but the work of other comrades, notably Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich… Although they are not here in person, they are here as a key influence and inspiration and, in a sense, are my co-presenters in spirit.

Before there was the Congress of South African Trade Unions, today’s COSATU, there was FOSATU. FOSATU was set up in 1979. There had been strikes and struggles in the 1970s, starting with a big strike wave in Namibia from 1971-1972, which was then a South African colony, then a big strike wave starting in Durban 1973, which spread around the country. Although we remember 1976 for the bravery of the youth and students, we must remember that the 1976 uprising also involved general strikes by the black working class, mass stay-aways.

And as the working class started to flex its muscles, and to organise new, independent unions, the need for unity was felt. In 1979, at Hammanskraal, FOSATU was set up. The flag of FOSATU was red, black and gold, with a hammer, a spanner and a spade. FOSATU grew quickly, despite repression by the apartheid state. Leaders and activists in FOSATU were banned, jailed; some, like Andries Raditsela, were murdered by police. There was continual intimidation, and employers would fire workers for going on strike or “agitating” at work. Unemployment is not just about money: unemployment is a weapon of the bosses, and this weapon was used many times against FOSATU.

But, despite the pain, repression and suffering of the comrades in FOSATU, it got bigger and bigger, and stronger and stronger, and by 1985 it was the single biggest black working class organisation in the country. And not just the biggest, but in many ways, the strongest. It didn’t just exist in a moment of protest, or as a crowd that gathers around a grievance or in a crisis; it existed continuously, as a democratic, bottom-up machine that ran smoothly even when struggles died down. And it had 150,000 members, it had large education programs, it had a newspaper, it had choirs, it had successful strikes and campaigns, it had affiliates across the economy.

FOSATU’S “Workerism”

“Workerism” was a label that was painted onto FOSATU by those who did not like what FOSATU was doing. The people who gave it the label were not the racist National Party government, were not the police’s brutal Security Branch, but the South African Communist Party and the African National Congress. They denounced FOSATU repeatedly.

There was a simple reason: FOSATU refused to bow down to a political party, it did not trust the ANC and it did not like the SACP’s top-down politics. FOSATU said that control in FOSATU needed to be in the hands of the workers, and that change in the country had to be radical and benefit the working class, and that parties could not be trusted to do this.

So, the first thing about “workerism” – the main current in FOSATU, and its core politics –was its emphasis on building autonomous workers’ unions. What that meant was that trade unions needed to be free of outside control. They needed to be controlled by their members – the ordinary workers – and not controlled inside the union by a few leaders, and not controlled outside the union by political parties, by the bosses or by the government.

We must remember that in those days there were large so-called registered trade unions like the Trade Union Council of South Africa. In fact TUCSA was bigger than FOSATU at one stage. But unions like TUCSA were sweet-heart unions, moderate, entangled into the state, run from above, and weak; they were racially segregated, largely excluding black Africans, and also treating their Coloured and Indian members badly.

FOSATU didn’t want to be anything like TUCSA. It wanted autonomy for the working class and poor, who were part of the working class. FOSATU wanted a union movement embracing all workers and under workers’ control. In reality, it was mainly black African in composition but it was strong in places where there was a large Coloured working class, for example Port Elizabeth and East London, and where there was a large Indian working class, for example Durban. In its search for the unity of the working class across race, FOSATU also tried to recruit white workers in the factories in Port Elizabeth, East Rand, the Vaal, but with little success.

Bottom-Up Industrial Unions

The second key part of FOSATU’s “workerism” was its stress on systematically building mass-based, bottom-up, profoundly democratic and fighting industrial unions. The idea was to organise industry by industry. So FOSATU would organise one union for the metal industry, one for textiles, one for chemicals and so on.

But rather than rely on laws or leaders, like TUCSA, FOSATU’s approach was to organise carefully, patiently. I call it the brick-by-brick approach that creates a mighty fortress. A good example was FOSATU’s Metal and Allied Workers Union, which was active in the ISCOR steel factories of the government, in the private sector car factories owned by multinationals, like Ford and Volkswagen, and in the metal and auto industry generally, much of it owned by local white capitalists.

FOSATU’s approach, illustrated by MAWU, was quite careful. It would set up a very clear program of action, targeting first a big factory, with, say, 4,000 workers: it’s easier to organise a big factory than a small factory. It would capture this base by forming a fighting union that raised demands and won them plus won “recognition agreements” (i.e. negotiating rights) with the bosses. From there, it sent out units to organise other factories nearby, including the smaller ones. Where needed, it would try and combine negotiations across factories, so that the smaller factories and union branches could be helped by the larger ones.

The idea is that you didn’t just declare a campaign and make a demand, without an organised base, and without working class power to back it. You wage careful, sometimes slow, social war, factory by factory, workplace by workplace. Each that you win over is another fortress, another centre of working class power from which you can expand outwards. You don’t make demands that you can’t win and you don’t drop a demand that you raise. So MAWU might demand, for example, equal wages across races, fight for it, even for two or three years, get a deal, also raise an issue around layoffs, fight, get a deal and so on. These were things that bosses did not want to give, they did not want to concede, but they had to be fought for, and they could be won.

Each struggle and each victory developed confidence, numbers and layers of militants, and made real gains for the working class. If you take the workers out into a battle that you can’t win, you lose the larger war; you lose the workers because they are tired and weakened; you break their hearts and wills. And struggle is based fundamentally on the fire and strength of the heart and mind, the will, that power within yourself to keep going. So that is a precious resource and FOSATU understood that you needed to manage it carefully.

By 1982, FOSATU had built MAWU into a mass-based metal union, as well as other strong unions. It was confident that it could confront the employers in key sectors and firms as well as the state where needed, act regionally and nationally and not just at individual workplaces, consolidate the power of the union base, and carry out struggles based on directions from the shop floor.

FOSATU did not, let me stress, reject participation in the formal Industrial Council negotiating system of the state. Rather, it insisted that all agreements be directed by and checked by, the base, to prevent the hijacking and misuse of their demands.

Assemblies and Committees

That brings me to the third key part of FOSATU’s “workerist” approach. What FOSATU stressed was that a union was not a head office or a service centre, but was based on the shop floor. So they organised based on regular mass meetings, or assemblies, that elected shop stewards, and gave them clear instructions, and made sure they reported back and acted against them if they did not. The idea was you wouldn’t have unions based on officials from outside the workplace; as much as possible the workers would be the organisers, and officialdom would be kept in check. This would be carried out within each union, and also across the federation.

So, the leadership at all levels were to be delegates, kept on a tight leash, always accountable to regular meetings. The idea here was to build a union that was based on many, many layers of cadreship, militants – and a leadership generated and regenerated from below. Remember, in the apartheid days, horrors like the 2012 massacre at Marikana, which shocked us, were a regular occurrence; death, torture, mass imprisonment were the daily business of the old regime.

The advantage was that, if one layer got taken out, sent to jail, banned, killed, the union survived. It was not secure because the different parts were separate and independent from each other, like independent cells with sporadic links – but rather, because it was deeply rooted in the workers at the workplaces, with the workers unified through effective, democratic structures and procedures that renewed themselves, in tight unions and a tight federation. The idea was that of a mandated, multi-layer worker-leadership.

Some people now praise assemblies and workers’ committees as an alternative to unions, but for FOSATU, the union and the federation centred on assemblies and workers’ committees.

People who were hired by the FOSATU unions or federation for specialist jobs, like media work or full-time organising, but who were not elected, could not vote in the union structures. Anyone hired was to earn an ordinary worker’s wage.

ANC and SACP enemies of FOSATU often claimed that “white intellectuals” were running it. And certainly FOSATU activists included people like Alec Erwin, a former university lecturer. But people like Erwin were a tiny minority in the union leadership; they served either in elected positions, and so were accountable, or in unelected non-voting positions, and so were contained. And most “intellectuals” in the union were black African or Coloured worker-intellectuals, like MAWU’s Moses Mayekiso and FOSATU’s Joe Foster.

Education, Identity, History

Fourth, FOSATU’s “workerism” placed a heavy emphasis on building working class education, working class identity, working class culture and working class history.

To understand that the working class and its struggles come from and to learn from earlier struggles, and to remember and value them, FOSATU outlined the history of the working class. That the working class in South Africa comes from the older classes of slaves and servants, sailors and soldiers. That the working class in South Africa is part of the working class of the whole world, with a common interest and struggle. That, in building a working class movement, we must understand where we come from, who are, to understand our struggles and recover our historical memory as a class, our pain and our victories.

In FOSATU Worker News, FOSATU outlined South African history from the perspective of the oppressed classes over three hundred years. It took a class line, attacking European colonialism and racism, but linking these to capitalism; and it drew attention to the role of African kings and chiefs in upholding oppression, including through slave-trading. Before FOSATU, there was the SA Congress of Trade Unions; before SACTU there was the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union; outside the unions there were movements like the slave revolts of the old Cape, unemployed movements, the anti-pass protests of the 1950s and 1910s, the squatter movements of the 1940s; and many more.

And FOSATU helped popularize and publicize this history – to celebrate it, but also to learn from past failures, such as how the ICU was destroyed by sloppy organising, unaccountable leaders and ineffective strategy. FOSATU also worked with the radical History Workshop of academics at the University of the Witwatersrand, participating in their conferences. In 1984, thousands of workers attended the conference, going to and presenting in seminars, learning, talking, making and enriching a history from below.

For FOSATU, we South Africans were part of the world’s working class: a South African worker, a Russian worker, a worker in Brazil were of the same class, with the same enemies. You can have Coca-Cola, you have a Sprite, a Pepsi, but they are all fizzy soft drinks. You are exploited in South Korea, you are exploited in Brazil, and you are exploited in Poland: different flavours but the same stuff. FOSATU stressed that the problems that we faced in the 1980s were not only South African problems, they are global, and part of a global struggle. So FOSATU highlighted struggles in Zimbabwe, Poland and Britain, and it located the South African class struggle in a global history of struggle.

FOSATU made interventions in a range of areas. It ran worker choirs, culture days, and promoted images and slogans that stressed its messages. Similarly FOSATU developed materials for the youth, around women’s issues, and engaged in a range of political and social areas.

Beyond Wages, Beyond Workplaces

That brings me to the fifth element: contrary to what its enemies said, FOSATU “workerism” was never about ignoring politics or ignoring the world beyond the workplace.

At the workplace, FOSATU did not just raise issues around wages and conditions but other issues too. They recognized that women workers, especially black women workers, faced specific forms of oppression. They raised the need for crèches and childcare at work, and noted how women’s jobs and incomes and promotion and role in the unions was affected by the double burden: after the factory, the home. They campaigned for changes and equality. They spent time catching bosses who were sexually harassing women, setting up traps and catching them, and getting them fired or disciplined.

FOSATU positioned itself as the voice of black, Coloured and Indian workers in a racist, capitalist society. It fought the apartheid wage gap, within the same jobs and between different jobs; and racist pension and labour relations and on-site facilities systems; and tackled the authoritarian and racist workplace management system. It fought to make the workplace more democratic, more non-racial.

So FOSATU’s “workerism” wasn’t just about money, wasn’t just about bus fares, wasn’t just about pensions, it was about the working class’s struggle for dignity in the workplace, against racism in the factories – and also beyond the workplace. Because FOSATU did not stop at the workplace. It campaigned against oppression in the townships and the larger society, the oppression of the black and Coloured and Indian working class community.

It fought around the specific issues that some workers faced that others did not, from the perspective of solidarity and unity: besides the oppression of women, they spoke to the youth, to the unemployed, they put a lot of stress on the plight of migrant workers in the towns, and of the workers in the homelands or Bantustans. While unions like FOSATU were able to operate fairly openly in so-called “white” South Africa, homeland leaders like Lucas Mangope and Gatsha Buthelezi did not allow independent unions at all. FOSATU fought this, opposed the homeland system, and tried to break into them and organise unions.

So FOSATU wanted to become involved in township and other struggles, and extend the influence of the unions and organised workers into these spheres. Where possible, FOSATU entered into alliances or common work, especially through its shop-steward councils, which spanned the different FOSATU unions.

These brought together FOSATU workers from different FOSATU affiliates, who lived or worked in the same area. These councils could then engage directly with local community organisations, both as members and leaders in these, and through them bring the power of the unions to bear in their support. This could range from forcing employers to put pressure on bus companies, to infusing these structures with democratic practices drawn from the FOSATU tradition, and radical ideas drawn from that tradition.

FOSATU’s politics also suggested that workers’ control meant that workers, as the majority in the township communities, also had to have a large level of influence in those communities.

Alliances, Errors, Hesitancy

FOSATU was criticized, sometimes correctly, for being a bit too cautious in these engagements, and for not giving a greater lead. Sometimes it worked in parallel with other structures, rather than with them; sometimes it stayed away from campaigns; generally it avoided long-term alliances.

Part of this hesitation was because FOSATU was afraid of being swallowed by other groups. It believed, correctly, that many community-based anti-apartheid groups lacked stable democratic structures; that they were often run by the petty bourgeoisie, much of which was aligned to the ANC, SACP and other nationalists; and some engaged in political thuggery, including against FOSATU. FOSATU did not trust forces from outside the working class, and did not trust nationalism, which downplayed class differences by stressing common racial and national experiences.

In hindsight, it can be argued that they would have been much stronger and more influential by building long-term links and alliances – tragically, FOSATU stayed out of the United Democratic Front, formed in 1983, and lost the chance to build links with large, like-minded youth and community currents in the UDF. They did work with UDF at times, or support it, but in staying out, they also surrendered it to the nationalists and middle class.

But it is not correct to present FOSATU’s “workerist” politics as narrow or bureaucratic. What FOSATU was doing was, in fact, carrying out its agenda, outlined at its 1982 congress in a position paper delivered by Joe Foster. This was that workers needed to be part of the “popular struggle” but to have their “own, powerful and effective organisation,” “worker leadership” in the neighbourhoods, and forge a “working class movement” that went beyond the unions. FOSATU understood that unions were not enough, that the project and power that was developing at workplaces also needed to extend the larger working class, and that unions should be only one part of the FOSATU project.

Expansive “Workers’ Control”

And this meant the need to strengthen the identity of the working class, to know where we fit into the capitalist system, to understand our power as the working class, and to understand that it is the working class alone who has the power to change society in a way that is fundamentally progressive.

So the notion that the FOSATU “workerist” politics was about being small and contained was completely wrong. There were contradictions and errors and hesitancy in FOSATU’s work, but it was never a moderate, narrow movement.

That brings me to the sixth element: FOSATU “workerism” involved dealing with issues beyond wages in the workplace, and also, it involved building beyond the workplace, but what was the aim?

It pointed to an expansion of worker control over the society and the economy as a whole, a new South Africa, in which the working class, the masses, were not just responding to what capital and the state were doing, but exercising real control. “Workers’ control,” at one level, meant workers control of the unions; but at another, it was a more radical vision of steady transformation.

This could build on steps like pushing back the frontier of control at work, for example, by having a growing input on decisions, but it would not end its steps there. A new South Africa had to be one in which capitalism and the profit system that exploited and oppressed the working class would be progressively removed.

Some of the workerists, like Mayekiso, argued clearly against the ANC slogan that “The People Must Govern,” asking: who are “the people”? Did they include capitalists? Homeland rulers?

“The people,” here, was rooted in the ANC’s nationalist politics, which downplayed class issues and aimed at a multi-class alliance of all democrats, rather than a class struggle of all working class people. The cost of that alliance, what made it possible, was retaining capitalism. But retaining capitalism meant retaining the exploitation of the majority.

In place of the ANC/SACP “Freedom Charter,” Mayekiso called for a Workers Charter, which would provide a basis for the workers to “take over and direct the whole” economy.

Elsewhere in Africa, independence brought positive reforms, but soon ended up captured by a nationalist elite that turned on the working class. FOSATU studied the case of neighbouring Zimbabwe very closely, noting that nationalists led by Robert Mugabe smashed up strikes and unions, and defended capitalism, soon after taking office.

Why would ANC be different? If there are workers at the bottom, whatever the colour of the president, who are suffering then there is no deep change. So Mayekiso insisted that the Freedom Charter was a “capitalist document,” rather than a program for “a change of the whole society.”

So what you can see here is a radical anti-capitalist class struggle politics. But at the same time, FOSATU distanced itself from the SACP, and through its support for workers’ struggles in Poland by the Solidarność union movement, also rejected the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its client states, because in these workers had no power.

Workers Power, National Liberation

This meant that the struggle against apartheid had to be linked to the struggle against apartheid. The ANC and SACP wanted to remove apartheid but follow it with a reformed capitalism, a first “stage” called the “national democratic revolution” or NDR. According to the SACP, this would later (somehow) be followed by a second “stage” of socialism.

FOSATU’s “workerism” did not just disagree with the SACP’s vision of what the second “stage” would be (a USSR-style dictatorship), but rejected splitting the anti-apartheid and the anti-capitalist struggles. Mayekiso insisted that “apartheid is an appendage and a branch of the whole thing – the tree of oppression of capitalism.” So it was not enough to defeat the son, apartheid, you had to defeat the father. Capitalism, Foster said, hid “behind the curtains of apartheid and racism,” but “capital and its lackeys were undoubtedly the major beneficiaries of apartheid.”

FOSATU argued against the NDR two-stage theory, which was being pushed in the UDF and in unions outside FOSATU and by ANC and SACP cells inside FOSATU. In Mayekiso’s words, there should not be “two stages” but “one stage continuous; this thing of two stages is a waste of time and a waste of blood.” So it was crucial that the unions and the working class did not get captured or confused by existing white capital or emerging black capital.

Working Class Nation

FOSATU wanted one nation – but centred on the working class. It believed in a united South Africa: remember in those days, there was the Bantustan policy, the apartheid segregation in everything from jobs to toilets to schools, around 14 different parliaments for different races and homelands, different TV stations, different everything.

For FOSATU, these divisions had to be removed, as unjust, and as part of the working class struggle: the working class has many races, languages and cultures, but it had to be united around a common identity and aim.

A new South African nation needed to overcome the old divisions, including race, but be forged in struggle and based on justice and equality. Race was not the basis of inclusion or exclusion, but racial equality through radical changes in the cities, in the economy, in the society was essential. Here, majority rule meant working class power, and, of course, the majority of the class was black African, Coloured and Indian.

So the new nation would be non-racial, but it would be one in which the working class predominated. It would be driving the car, not fixing the car. It would be one in which the working class put its imprint on the nation. The culture of the nation would be that of the working class. The governance and power of the nation would be vested as much as possible in the working class.

It is sometimes argued that the choice is between national liberation (from apartheid) and workers’ liberation (from capitalism), but FOSATU never set up such an empty choice: rather, real national liberation for the working class required workers power and anti-capitalism.

In Closing: Strengths & Weaknesses

I want to make three general points in closing. One, in many ways FOSATU was right. If we look at South Africa today, the poverty, powerlessness, injustice, if we look at how people like Cyril Ramaphosa – in his time, a hero of the working class, a union man, today a capitalist and a traitor – if we look at the ANC today, we have exactly the anti-worker outcome that FOSATU warned against.

FOSATU was right: when you get tied into the political parties, they take your best and brightest and corrupt them, they seek to capture the unions and smother them. FOSATU was right: the working class needs its own independent program, it needs to be anti-capitalist, its power needs to rest in working class mass organisations, not just in unions but communities and it cannot rest until capitalism is defeated by workers control.

But, in other ways, FOSATU was also wrong. FOSATU had a good criticism, a good daily practice and a vision of a good future. But at the level of a strategy linking what it did, in organising, educating and mobilising, and what it wanted in the end – that new South Africa it sought – there was no clear link. You can pack your bags for a trip to Cape Town, but unless you have got a plan to get there you are probably not going to get there.

In terms of a strategy linking the vision, linking workers’ control today to a working class-centred new nation, linking present-day winnable demands to a massive shift in power and wealth, linking criticism of the nationalists to defeating the nationalists – FOSATU fell down.

Some parts of FOSATU were spending their time on court cases as part of a strategy to reshape the state; some parts were aiming at taking power: these are not the same thing. Some parts were working with the ANC quietly, some parts were saying to hell with the ANC. Some parts thought of the new South Africa as socialist, others as social democratic. All were vague on details. “Workerism” was not anarcho-syndicalism but a mixture of different ideas.

The “workerist” thinking in FOSATU wasn’t developed enough. This was partly because of daily pressures and a stress on getting things done. But it was also because the “workerists” hadn’t organised themselves into a specific group that could develop theory and strategy. They were a network, based in the unions, rather than a coherent group.

This also meant that, when the ANC and SACP began to build cells and secret cabals in the FOSATU unions, the workerists were not able to respond effectively. They needed to organise as a group in the unions, and outside the unions, including in the UDF, to plan and evaluate and strategise and intervene. Not just to clarify the problems in strategy, but to deal with other threats too.

People like Jacob Zuma, then the head of ANC secret intelligence, were directing ANC/SACP plans to capture the unions: they were skilled and they did not care about democracy. And they ended up winning.

When FOSATU joined with other unions in 1985 to form COSATU, it was the biggest and best-organised bloc, and the first COSATU resolutions had a deep “workerist” imprint, including independence from parties. Within two years, they were gone as a serious force. Even MAWU, which became the heart of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in 1987, ended up adopting the Freedom Charter and NDR, even if they gave this a radical interpretation. Jay Naidoo, a great activist but an ANC cadre, was one who worked inside FOSATU, and he helped forge the defeat of “workerism” in COSATU.

Tomorrow, Today

Third, in closing, let us remember something key from FOSATU: the idea that tomorrow is built today, that, as MAWU said, learn from the past, act in the present, to build the future. What we do now shapes what we get tomorrow – you cannot take a tree that is growing, cut it down, take off the bark, take off the leaves and use as a kierie, or club, and then put it back in the ground and think that it is going to be a tree. You cannot build an undemocratic organisation and think it will become democratic. You cannot raise your dog to bite people and then be surprised when it bites people.

If we want a democratic, worker-controlled society, FOSATU understood, you need democratic unions and a democratic working class movement. If you want a society beyond capitalism you need clear ideas of how to get there and you need to practice what you preach. The ANC in exile was a top-down structure, it was run from the top by men like Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, top-down. When the ANC was unbanned, the exiled ANC took over and systematically undermined the best of the democratic traditions of the UDF, which it soon disbanded, and of COSATU, which it has systematically penetrated. It did not have democratic traditions or tolerate opponents then, and there should be no surprise that it is undemocratic and intolerant now.


* Lucien van der Walt delivered the talk, but it is based on joint work with Sian Byrne and Nicole Ulrich. See Sian Byrne, Nicole Ulrich and Lucien van der Walt, 2017, “Red, Black and Gold: FOSATU, South African ‘Workerism,’ ‘Syndicalism’ and the Nation,” in Edward Webster and Karin Pampillas (eds.), The Unresolved National Question in South Africa: Left Thinking Under Apartheid. Wits University Press.

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