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 white monopoly capital and its black empowerment allies within the ANC. The ANC’s professed bias towards the working class was displaced, but remained at the level of rhetoric in order to keep its left flank happy. This sore festered for eleven years, as the SACP and Cosatu diffused pressure from their own left to leave the alliance owing to the fear that the ANC would lurch to the right if they did. Cosatu did help to form the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) in 2000, with groups to the left of the ANC – but the backlash from the ANC was so strong that it backed off, even to the point, in 2002, of kicking the APF out of its building. Cosatu also did not intervene in the dismissal of independent socialist John Appolis as regional secretary of the Chemical, Paper, Packaging, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union (Ceppwawu), for daring to initiate a referendum among members on whether or not they wanted to be part of the alliance (Pillay, 2006).
Cosatu was aware that any attempt to leave the alliance would split the federation, and the SACP dared not test its support outside the protective cover of the ANC. Worker surveys conducted before every national election since 1994 pointed to overwhelming, if gradually declining, support for the alliance (Buhlungu, 2006). A better strategy was to ‘swell the ranks’ of the ANC with working-class members who would reshape policy and ensure that pro-working-class leaders were elected to high office within the party.
Indeed, after the low point of 2001, when Mbeki faced down the left after anti-privatisation strikes (amid increasingly successful new social movement mobilisation), the ANC Alliance left did regroup. It started to make inroads into ANC policy, forcing the ANC to increasingly describe itself as a ‘social-democratic’ party, and not a ‘neoliberal’ one (ANC Political Education Unit, 2002). In addition, the ANC government stole much of the thunder of new social movements by partially addressing community concerns over affordable water and electricity provision. The alleged victimisation of deputy president Jacob Zuma, who was dismissed as the country’s deputy president in 2005 and later charged with corruption, presented Cosatu and the SACP with an opportunity to shift the balance of forces in the ANC in their favour. When moves were afoot in 2005 to get the ANC, at its June policy conference, to liberalise its labour market policies, the left8 mobilised to defeat this proposal. Zuma supporters linked the defeat of the proposal to support for the ousted deputy president (who was reaffirmed as the ANC deputy president).
If, in 2004, only three per cent of Cosatu members felt that Zuma represented workers’ interests (Buhlungu, 2006), by the time of the 2006 Cosatu congress Zuma had delegates eating out of his hand. Indeed, in 2005, Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said that only a ‘tsunami’ could stop Zuma from becoming the country’s next president. Vavi and SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande campaigned vigorously among workers for Zuma, and sidelined or purged activists who disagreed with this strategy. A climate of fear fell over the working-class movement, and few dared to publicly question the suitability of Zuma. Dismissing critics who queried in what way Zuma, a polygamist Zulu traditionalist charged with corruption in the notorious arms deal, could be seen to be on the left, Cosatu and SACP leaders insisted that Zuma would be more attentive to working-class interests (Pillay, 2008).
THE ROAD FROM POLOKWANE
At Polokwane, the SACP/Cosatu strategy of ‘swelling the ranks’ of the ANC with working class members – in conjunction with support from the ANC Youth League, among others – paid off, as the Zuma slate received sixty per cent of the vote compared to Mbeki’s forty per cent. Resolutions taken at the conference seemed to confirm the drift towards a ‘democratic developmental state’ and away from neoliberalism.
Nonetheless, this was not a decisive shift. Under Mbeki, Gear’s market fundamentalism was steadily being discarded in favour of a more pragmatic policy approach that embraced the concept of an interventionist ‘developmental state’.9 Polokwane may have given it added urgency but there was no overall commitment to move away from a conservative macroeconomic policy stance (although Cosatu (2010a) continues to argue that this was strongly implied).
Where there did seem to be a decisive shift was in a greater commitment to the alliance, and indeed during 2008 the alliance met regularly. There was increasing hope that it, and not the ANC, would become the ‘political centre’. This, however, was rejected by the new ANC leadership,10 which also assured the markets that macroeconomic policy would not change significantly. Indeed – although he was forced to retract after an outcry by Cosatu – Zuma even hinted to the business world that there would be greater labour market flexibility. This trend continued after the ousting of Mbeki as state president in September 2008, with Kgalema Motlanthe installed in his place until elections the following year (Marais, 2011).
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