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New South African Review 2
New Paths, Old Compromises?
By John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall Wits University Press
Copyright © 2011 Wits University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-86814-793-9
CHAPTER 1
The Tripartite Alliance and its discontents: Contesting the 'National Democratic Revolution' in the Zuma era
Devan Pillay
Despite increasingly shrill public spats between alliance partners since the 2009 elections, was John Kane-Berman, head of the South African Institute of Race Relations, correct to suggest that 'staying in the alliance was the better strategy to push the political centre of gravity of the African National Congress (ANC) further to the left' (Business Day, 31 January 2011)? Kane-Berman was lamenting the influence of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) over impending labour legislation, but his fears chimed with broader concerns from within the business community regarding future economic policy. Government's New Growth Path, launched in October 2010, suggests greater state intervention in the economy, and calls for the nationalisation of sectors of the economy are growing within the ANC.
Left critics, by contrast, argue that the alliance, through its National Democratic Revolution (NDR) ideological discourse, fulfils an important legitimating function. It glues together disparate social classes under the hegemony of conservative class interests – a coalition of white and emerging comprador black capital (enmeshed in ever-expanding networks of patronage and corruption), and a professional black middle class that has done rather well out of the post-apartheid dispensation. In other words, the organised working class are being deceived – by their leadership, also implicated in patronage politics – into supporting the ANC against their own class interests, and some believe that the time has come to build a 'left opposition' outside the alliance.
The alliance left, however, insist that since Jacob Zuma assumed the leadership of the ANC at the December 2007 Polokwane conference, space has opened for further contestation within the ANC and the government. To leave the alliance and build a left opposition outside it would, on the one hand, abandon that space to predatory right-wing forces and, on the other, relegate the left to the political fringe, no more than what ANC general secretary and SA Communist Party (SACP) chair-person Gwede Mantashe calls a 'debating society'.
Alliance supporters also argue that, despite slow progress towards reducing inequality and eradicating poverty, the alliance remains essential to holding the centre together by preserving national coherence through an increasingly tension-ridden but nevertheless persistent 'nonracial' discourse, and preventing South Africa from splitting into a dangerously fractious contest over resources. The working class understand that this is in their interests and are influencing their leadership in the unions and SACP, as much as leadership is influencing them.
In other words, despite its class biases and its acknowledged 'sins of incumbency', is the ANC Alliance the only hope for setting the country on an inclusive developmental path? Or does there need to be greater political uncertainty, credible electoral challenges from the left (or, for liberal pluralists, from the right as well) to prevent the ruling party from taking citizens for granted? Indeed, are the two mutually exclusive?
This chapter examines the state of the alliance since the 2007 Polokwane national congress of the ANC, but within the context of the movement's powerful discourse on the national democratic revolution which first emerged in the 1920s. It then considers the various events since the 2007 Polokwane conference that seemingly threaten the stability of the alliance, a recent survey of Cosatu members' political attitudes and, briefly, an attempt by ousted SACP officials and independent socialists to build an alternative pole of attraction outside the alliance.
THE NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION (NDR)
There has been a long history of alliance-building between the nationalist liberation movement and working-class formations. From 1924, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) theorised that the overthrow of capitalism could not occur through a 'pure' class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The pivotal 1922 white mineworkers strike disabused them of the hope that white workers could be in the vanguard of the class struggle against capitalism because the white mine-workers were too racist, and saw their salvation in white nationalism and the job colour bar (Simons and Simons, 1983). While class exploitation was the 'primary' or 'fundamental' contradiction, the 'dominant' contradiction in the colonial context was that between the colonised people and the white supremacist state. In other words, colonial oppression provoked an anti-colonial and nationalist consciousness within the majority of the population.
The task of communists was to play a leading role in the black nationalist movement to bring about national democracy in the 'first stage' through a multiclass alliance against white rule, and to proceed to socialism in the 'second stage', which would be ensured by building working-class power at the point of production through strong industrial unions and in communities (through various kinds of working-class civic formations). The CPSA did not abandon hope of building a nonracial working-class movement, and continued to organise among white workers, but on the whole their activities during the 1930s and 1940s increasingly involved organising black workers and working within the ANC. Communists wanted to ensure that African nationalism would, at worst, not be anti-communist and would, at best, be modernist, be increasingly nonracial, be anti-imperialist, and have a working-class bias. It would not, however, be explicitly socialist, as this would detract from its broad appeal.
This 'two-stage' character of the NDR attracted much criticism from those to the left of the CPSA, who felt that it owed too much to Joseph Stalin's 'bastardisation' of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism, unlike the Leninist-Trotskyist notion of 'permanent revolution', one 'uninterrupted' socialist revolution led by an independent working class party that was not subordinated to nationalism (for example, see Legassick, 2007).
When the CPSA was banned in 1950 following increased mass mobilisation after the apartheid government came to power in 1948, it disbanded and re-formed underground in 1953 as the SACP. Leading members played a key role in setting up the white Congress of Democrats (COD) and bolstering the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) and Coloured Peoples' Congress (CPC). Communists were also central to the formation of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu) in 1955. The informal and semi-formal expressions of alliance politics in the 1940s now took on a more formal character with the 1955 Congress of the People at which the Freedom Charter (which served as the binding document of the Congress Alliance composed of the SAIC, CPC, COD, Sactu and the ANC, with the latter seen as the leading component) was launched. This has remained a key reference point for the current Tripartite Alliance.
The Freedom Charter melded together liberal-democratic freedoms and socialistic aspirations such as the nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, land redistribution and social welfare. While not a socialist or anti-capitalist document in the hard sense of the term, it had a strong social-democratic flavour in keeping with sentiments popular among post-war ruling parties in northern European countries. This gave it broad appeal. On the one hand, Nelson Mandela could assert that it opened up opportunities for 'non-European' entrepreneurship, while on the other the communists could point to the Charter as a stepping stone towards socialism – but as a result the document could also be denounced by right critics for being 'communist' and by leftists for fudging the question of socialist advance. The influence of white communists in the drafting of the Charter also alienated Africanists, resulting in the splitting-away of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) in 1959. Although this did not remove a narrow Africanism from the ANC, it helped pave the way for a more inclusive nonracial nationalism.
Communists were at the forefront of placing emphasis on an inclusive, cross-class nonracialism within the liberation movement, and while its theory of colonialism of a special type implicated capitalism in the rise of colonialism and apartheid, in practice it de-emphasised class divisions in the interests of nationalism (Wolpe, 1987). However, proletarian assertions coming from an increasingly mobilised trade union movement gave confidence to those arguing for a leading role for the working class in the 'revolutionary alliance'.
After the ANC was banned in 1961, the movement in exile absorbed all sections of the alliance into its ranks, in effect making it a nonracial organisation, although it was only in 1985 at the Kabwe conference that the ANC formally admitted 'non-Africans' into the ANC. At its 1969 Morogoro conference in Tanzania, the ANC recognised the 'leading role' of the working class. However, the ANC remained vague as to whether the working class was 'leading' because of its potentially anti-capitalist, pro-socialist orientation, or because it was merely the majority within the black population. This deliberate fudging was deemed essential to the maintenance of a multiclass alliance, which explains the ANC's broad appeal in later years. Critics argued that it subordinated working-class interests to that of the middle class rather than the other way around. Indeed, former ANC president Nelson Mandela, in his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, remarked:
'The cynical have always suggested that the communists are using us. But who is to say we are not using them?' (1995: 139).
These foundational issues, which gave further definition to the binding ideology of the NDR, re-emerged during the turbulent 1980s, and persist today as the ANC continues to undergo intense internal contestation around its future direction.
BETWEEN 'SOCIAL MOVEMENT' AND 'POLITICAL' UNIONISM
After the Freedom Charter was revived in the 1980s, it became the guiding document of the United Democratic Front (UDF) which was formed in 1983 as an ANC-supporting broad front inside the country. The revived nonracial union movement, particular those unions that formed the Federation of South African Trade Unions (Fosatu) in 1979, was initially cautious about its relationship with the ANC and SACP. It expressed strong reservations about being 'hijacked' by middle-class 'populist' politicians, pointing to the experiences of other liberation struggles, and to the subordination of Sactu to the ANC in the 1950s. Fosatu argued that Sactu's demise in the 1960s was due its leading organisers having been detained, killed or sent into exile as a result of their immersion in ANC ativities. Thus the federation wanted to build strong, durable mass organisations at the workplace before entering the dangerous terrain of state-power politics. It flirted with ideas (forming its own working class party, or engaging with state power as an independent union formation and entering into alliances with other groups entirely on its own terms) which its ANC/UDF critics labelled 'workerist' or 'syndicalist'. On this basis, it (and the Western Cape-based General Workers' Union and Food and Canning Workers' Union) refused to join the UDF in 1983, unlike a new generation of smaller, explicitly pro-ANC 'community' unions led by the South African Allied Workers' Union (Pillay, 2008).
By 1984, as township rebellions spilled over into the workplace, pressure built up within Fosatu to become more involved in state-power politics. ANC sympathisers within Fosatu affiliates played a key role in mediating between the 'workerists' and the 'populists' within the union movement (Naidoo, 2010). This led to the formation of Cosatu in 1985, bringing together Fosatu and its allies, the UDF unions, as well as the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). As the largest affiliate of Cosatu, the NUM would go on to play a key role in championing the cause of the ANC within Cosatu, against more sceptical unions from the Fosatu tradition. Cyril Ramaphosa, the NUM general secretary, moved from black consciousness to embrace the ANC, and became part of its internal leadership group after the release of Govan Mbeki from prison in 1989 (Allen, 2003; Butler, 2007).
At its inception in 1985, Cosatu exemplified 'social movement unionism', where democratically organised workers engage in both 'production politics' at the workplace and the 'politics of state power'. Unlike a narrower form of 'syndicalism', this involved explicit alliances with movements and organisations outside the workplace, but under strict conditions of union independence based on shopfloor accountability. The 1987 adoption of the Freedom Charter as a 'stepping stone to socialism' by Cosatu further entrenched this strategic compromise, which recognised the increasing popularity of the ANC-SACP alliance as well as a strong belief in the independence of the labour movement (Naidoo, 2010). The idea was to combine the best of 'populism' (an emphasis on cross-class solidarity against the apartheid state) and 'workerism' (ensuring working-class independence and democratic shopfloor accountability), such that the working-class led the struggle against apartheid (Pillay, 2008).
Independent socialists who continued to be wary of the SACP for its 'Stalinist' history and subordination to the ANC's nationalism drew comfort from the fact that working-class power was rising during the late 1980s. In effect, with the banning of the UDF in 1987, the labour movement took on the leadership role of the internal resistance movement (Naidoo, 2010). As long as this continued, the possibility of working-class leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle was kept alive.
In its meetings with the ANC, SACP and Sactu in exile, Cosatu stressed that it was an independent formation and not a transmission belt for the ANC. Together with the UDF, it had some influence on the relatively hierarchical ANC and SACP, helping to deepen the lessons learnt during the Gorbachev era about the failures of one-party state 'socialism', and a greater appreciation of the values of mass participatory democracy (Callinicos, 2004; Butler, 2007; Naidoo, 2010). As unionists and independent socialists joined the SACP in numbers after 1990, it showed signs that it was shedding its adherence to a Stalinised form of Marxism-Leninism. The hope was raised that it could become the non-dogmatic, independent, and counter-hegemonic mass workers' party that many in Cosatu wished for. This promise, however, was largely unfulfilled (Williams, 2008).
When the ANC and SACP were unbanned in 1990, the worst fears of 'workerists' seemed realised, as the ANC took over the leadership of the internal movement and gradually reduced Cosatu to the role of one interest group among many. Ironically, many prominent workerists went on to join the ANC in government and parliament, and some went further, to become wealthy businessmen. Others, however, remained in the union movement to build on Cosatu's heritage as an embodiment of social movement unionism.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New South African Review 2 by John Daniel, Prishani Naidoo, Devan Pillay, Roger Southall. Copyright © 2011 Wits University Press. Excerpted by permission of Wits University Press.
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