Plaut South Africa's Uneasy Alliance

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-86842-555-6
Verlag: Jonathan Ball
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

The communist party in South Africa began as a revolutionary movement. In exile in the 1960s and 1970s it took on significance its numbers never warranted through its relationship with the Soviet Union and the weapons it brought to the armed struggle. Today it worries that it has been absorbed into the ANC machinery of government, without being able to retain its own identity. The unions of Cosatu were born out of the fight against poverty level wages of the 1970s. Their culture comes from the shop-floor and the democracy of the shop steward movement. They played a critical role in ending apartheid through their links with the United Democratic Front and the grassroots groups in the townships. African Nationalism, Marxism-Leninism and popular democracy are never easy ideological partners. Yet the Alliance has survived and flourished. The cost of this relationship has been endless disputes. While each element of the Alliance pledges its support for the greater good, it fights for its own corner. The history of post-apartheid South Africa is littered with examples of how this has been played out. The overthrow of President Thabo Mbeki by Jacob Zuma in 2007 would have been unthinkable without the complex web of relationships that were developed within the Alliance. As the ANC moves towards its elective conference in Mangaung in December 2012, tensions within the Alliance are at breaking point once more. In theory this is a purely internal ANC party issue. But candidates for the top job are battling it out and the support of the unions and the Communist Party is a critical element in their campaigns. These battles can only be understood in the context of the Alliance - an extraordinary but poorly understood movement.

Martin Plaut is the Africa editor, BBC World Service News and has been reporting on the continent for more than 25 years. He has published widely about the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Plaut, Martin

Leseproben

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Chapter 1 The Uneasy Alliance The alliance between the African National Congress, the South African Communist Party and the trade unions in Cosatu is perhaps the most important political force in the country.1 More influential than Parliament, it is debates within the Alliance, rather than speeches before the legislature, that are the critical impetus within South Africa today. The fact that the ANC sees its members of Parliament as primarily representatives of the party, rather than of the electorate, has a lot to do with this. There are no constituencies with their own MP to hold to account. The proportional representation system means that MPs are answerable only to their parties, which decide where they will be on the all-important, career-defining party lists. The 1994 code of conduct for ANC MPs specifically states that: ‘All elected members shall be under the constitutional authority of the highest decision-making bodies of the ANC, and decisions and policies of the highest ANC organs shall take precedence over all other structures, including ANC structures in Parliament and government.’2 The code of conduct further forbids any ‘attempt to make use of the parliamentary structures to undermine organisational decisions and policies’. This has undermined the centrality of Parliament. Hardly surprising that ANC MPs are frequently absent during debates. Their chief whip can only bemoan the ‘empty benches’ and complain that this will ‘erode the image and integrity of this institution and betray the trust that the people placed in us’.3 Hardly a day goes by without a reference to the Alliance, yet little is really known about just how it operates. Even its origins remain obscure. With no founding document and no written constitution, it is nonetheless the beating heart of South African politics. The Alliance’s objective is to realise what is termed the ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (NDR). Its initial aim was to eradicate apartheid, but its ultimate goal was much wider. The SACP quotes from the Green Book drawn up by the ANC in 1979, to lay out the aims of the Alliance:4 The aims of our national democratic revolution will only be fully realised with the construction of a social order in which all the historic consequences of national oppression and its foundation, economic exploitation, will be liquidated, ensuring the achievement of real national liberation and social emancipation. An uninterrupted advance towards this ultimate goal will only be assured if within the alignment of revolutionary forces struggling to win the aims of our national democratic revolution, the dominant role is played by the oppressed working people. The communists then outline just how they believe the relationship between their party and the ANC should develop: ‘The Party had also understood that the main organisational vehicle to achieve the goals of these shared political perspectives beyond just the NDR, was the Alliance, primarily between the ANC and the SACP.’ They point to the fact that during their years underground the relationship between the ANC and the SACP ‘evolved into a deeper relationship and conscious collaboration between communists’ inside both the ANC and its military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, ‘with communists occupying prominent and leading positions in the latter two formations’.5 The party’s aim was and continues to be a close, at times symbiotic relationship, with SACP members holding key positions within the ANC while retaining their positions in their own organisation. The third element of the Alliance is the trade union movement. The unions, which developed during the first half of the twentieth century, came under the shadow of the ANC and the SACP during the 1950s. As we shall show, the non-racial unions, members of the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu) were drawn into a relationship with the ANC and the communists, which gradually sapped their ability to represent the organised black working class. When the unions re-emerged in the 1970s they were determined to retain their independence, and continue to jealously guard their rights, even while working with their political allies. Although the Alliance is vital to South African political life, the way in which it functions is less than transparent. It operates largely in private and seldom publishes details of its debates, even if many of its key decisions are soon leaked to the public. While the organisations that constitute the Alliance have public faces and work openly in civil society, the same cannot be said of the body that binds them together. Discussions within the Alliance are perhaps too sensitive to conduct in the open, since it is here that the horse-trading takes place that is the real substance of politics. One report on the Tripartite Alliance Summit of 1997 (three years after the first post-apartheid general election) gave a fascinating glimpse into its workings.6 It spoke of the national secretariats of the three organisations meeting on a ‘fairly regular basis (in theory fortnightly) throughout the last three and a quarter years’. But it went on to say that such meetings ‘often lack a capacity to carry through decisions, reflecting organisational weaknesses within the respective formations. The meetings are often focused on immediate interventions, and on crisis management.’ National officials of the ANC, SACP and the unions also met ‘relatively frequently’. There had been five meetings of the executive of the Alliance before September 1997. It was resolved that they would in future be more frequent, ‘around 3 per year’. This may have been accepted, but certainly in recent years meetings have not been held at this frequency, leaving the SACP and Cosatu to grumble about the ANC’s apparent lack of interest in convening Alliance summits. In recent years the Alliance has become increasingly dysfunctional. Since by its very nature it embodies the stresses and strains of South African society, encapsulating the divergent interests of its constituent elements, Alliance members find themselves both operating within and fighting against the state. Key members like union leader Zwelinzima Vavi work with Alliance colleagues while keeping up a blistering attack on them. How else does one explain his warning that: ‘If the broad liberation movement does not act decisively, we are heading rapidly in the direction of a full-blown predator state, in which a powerful, corrupt and demagogic elite of political hyenas will increasingly control the state as a vehicle for self-enrichment.’7 In its current form the Alliance officially came into being on 9 May 1990,8 but its origins go far further back in time. In his speech to the ANC rally marking the party’s centenary on 8 January 2012, Jacob Zuma traced its roots to the 1920s:9 The movement prides itself on having a strong historical relationship with the working class. The South African Communist Party was formed in 1921 and had engaged itself in issues affecting workers and the working class. Already then, the seeds of a unique Alliance were germinating when the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa resolved to work together in 1929. Meanwhile, the relationship with the trade union movement can be traced back to the first major trade union of Africans, the Industrial Workers Union, which was formed in Bloemfontein in 1920 and also through the South African Congress of Trade Unions (Sactu), and later the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Roots of the relationship The ANC was founded in 1912, and the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921. The trade unions can trace their origins even further back in time. The first recorded strike was on the docks in Cape Town in 1854, but it was the discovery of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1886 that led to the development of mining and with it the first unions. In 1891 the ‘Knights of Labour’ was formed to fight for the rights of workers, declaring ‘perpetual war and opposition to the encroachment of monopoly and organized capital’.10 But these were unions established specifically to fight for the rights of white workers. They opposed black and Chinese labour being brought onto the mines to undercut their wages. This confrontation came to a climax with the Rand Revolt of 1922, when the gold price collapsed and 10 000 white miners feared retrenchment. Under the notorious banner, ‘Workers of the World Fight and Unite for a White South Africa,’ they took on the state. Prime Minister Jan Smuts ordered out the military, and broke the strike by force of planes, tanks and machine guns. Around 250 strikers died, 5 000 were arrested and four executed.11 Black workers had begun to organise in the aftermath of the First World War. Clements Kadalie founded the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) in 1919, and by 1927 had 100 000 members.12 The Communist Party, which had earlier concentrated on working with white unions and rejected the ANC as dominated by ‘instruments of the ruling class’, decided in the mid-1920s to turn to black labour.13...