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.3 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)4 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).5 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 workerists6 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.
Since 1990, when the ANC and SACP dissolved Sactu and formally drew Cosatu into a triple alliance in pursuit of the NDR, Cosatu drifted towards a narrower form of ‘political unionism’.7 While retaining its independence and its commitment to mass action where necessary, and continuing to engage in wide-ranging policy contestation inside and outside multiparty corporatist forums such as the National Economic, Development and Labour Council (Nedlac), Cosatu dared not push too far and forge links with movements outside the triple alliance. This was despite severe misgivings about government’s adoption of the market-friendly, economically orthodox Growth, Employment and Redistribution (Gear) policy in 1996 – and particularly without first consulting the ANC or any of its alliance partners (Marais, 2011). The popularity of the ANC was by that stage too great, perhaps, for any alternative path to be feasible for Cosatu.
Although initially supportive of Gear, the SACP soon realised its full implications, and began increasingly to side with Cosatu against the ANC government on policy matters (in particular macroeconomic policy, HIV/AIDS and Zimbabwe). This coincided with Cosatu’s commitment to fund the SACP’s salary and office expenses around the country in the interests of furthering the working-class struggle and building socialism within the womb of the NDR (Pillay, 2008).
The ‘1996 class project’, as Cosatu and the SACP later termed it, meant that the ANC-in-government was captured by particular capitalist class interests, namely