Organised labour was the driving force behind the defeat of apartheid and the ushering in a democratic order in South Africa.
The birth of Cosatu in 1985 introduced a formidable, organized force in the struggle against apartheid that, combined with the anti-apartheid BDS (boycott, divest and sanctions) movement and the uprisings in the townships, forced the racist regime to capitulate and ultimately relinquish state power.
As Cosatu celebrates 39 years of its existence, the broader labour movement arguably has nothing to celebrate after 30 years of ANC rule. Indeed, the formation of the Government of National Unity (GNU) marked the end of the ANC-SACP-Cosatu Alliance as the historic bloc, in Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, that governed and led the country.
The GNU represented the capitulation of the ANC to political and economic interests that are opposed to those of the working class and the poor.
The power of Cosatu, and more generally of organized labour, was arguably reduced when the ANC lost its parliamentary majority in the May 2024 national elections.
The theoretical foundation of the strategic objectives of the ANC-SACP-Cosatu Alliance, the national democratic revolution (NDR), was blown to pieces when the ANC embraced the DA, IFP and the FFF+ as its political partners in the GNU.
These three political parties have impeccable track records of attacking organized labour, the working class and the poor.
The ANC has long been travelling the path of betrayal and trampling upon the interests of the masses in whose name it waged the national liberation struggle.
The much-lauded miracle of the successful and peaceful negotiations that ushered in the new democratic order has turned out, with hindsight, to be a myth.
A lot of innocent blood was shed during the negotiations such as the massacres in Boipatong and Bisho, the commuter train massacres, the reign of terror of the apartheid-sponsored Witdoeke in Crossroads, Cape Town, and the killing fields of KwaZulu-Natal in which the IFP was secretly armed and trained by the apartheid regime.
The working class was made to wade through a river of blood before it was allowed to win the vote.
But the fruits of victory were to be enjoyed by white monopoly capital and its Johnny-come-lately sidekick, the aspirant black bourgeoisie.
This process was neatly captured by Patrick Bond in his aptly titled book, Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa.
The GNU is thus the culmination of this long in the making self-serving accommodation of the country’s political and economic elites.
Where does this leave organized labour? What is the fate of Cosatu and the labour movement under the GNU?
Cosatu leaders have long pretended that they have the ear of the ANC, a lie often repeated by the enemies of the working class when putting pressure on the ANC to protect and promote the interests of the capitalist class. In reality, at the moment of taking power, the ANC was listening with one ear to the masses and another ear to the bosses.
Over time and with processes of class formation including the rise of the black middle class and the black bourgeoisie, the ANC was listening to the bosses outside the ANC and the bosses inside the ANC.
As many top leaders of Cosatu became filthy rich including Cyril Ramaphosa, Johnny Copelyn, Marcel Golding, and many others, the ANC’s credentials as ‘worker-friendly’ became increasingly suspect.
Numsa was first among the unions to say the emperor had no clothes. Cosatu expelled Numsa with its 360,000 members mainly because it called for the dissolution of the ANC-SACP-Cosatu Alliance which it said was no longer serving the working class. Numsa said it could not vote for an ANC that was serving capitalist interests.
Under ANC rule, even before the GNU, the working class and the poor have been living in a neoliberal hell in South Africa.
A quarter of working-class children are malnourished and stunted.
More than 40% of workers are unemployed. The top 1% owns 45% of the country’s wealth. Inequality is the highest in the world with a Gini coefficient of 0.67. Murders are at a 20-year high of 27,000 people killed in a year.
The abuse of drugs and alcohol is of great concern. Gender-based violence continues unabated.
Employed workers face retrenchments in the public and private sectors. The mining sector is regularly and routinely retrenching workers or giving notice to do so.
In 2024, the South African Post Office laid off 4,875 workers, Sibanye Stillwater laid off 2,600 workers, Anglo American Platinum is planning to kill 4,300 jobs, and austerity in the public sector leaves many vacancies unfilled in a process of surreptitious retrenchment.
A veritable, in Zwelinzima Vavi’s words, workers’ bloodbath.
Under the GNU, the attacks on labour are bound to intensify.
Some of the ANC’s partners in the GNU are opposed to the minimum wage, they are determined to reduce the public sector wage bill, they are opposed to the National Health Insurance, and they are in favour of changing the country’s labour laws in ways that will weaken organized labour.
They agreed with the policy of “Operation Vala Umgodi” (close the hole in isiZulu) – the sealing of entrances to the abandoned mines and cutting off food supplies to the Zama Zama miners buried underground.
The Marxist scholar, Nancy Fraser, has argued that the exploitation of labour under capitalism is not possible without expropriation, that is, without gendered, racialised and imperialist dispossession and oppression.
In the year 2025, if South African organized labour is to move forward and address some of the problems faced by the working class, it will have to face head-on the structural oppressions generated by racial capitalism and its colonial roots.
It has to attack private property and vested interests economically and politically. It can no longer hide behind the ANC’s lies and pretensions.
Cosatu leaders must be brave and bold. Life begins at 40.
** Dr Trevor Ngwane is a Sociology Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.
***The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of Independent Media or IOL
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