ANC, a working class enemy, not an ally
On the first day of the COSATU congress, the delegates booed and heckled the National Chairperson of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, to stop him from addressing the congress. It is not new for COSATU workers to heckle ANC leadership off the stage; Cyril Ramaphosa had to be rescued by the police from the mineworkers during the May Day rally this year. However, the heckling at the COSATU Congress is politically and historically significant.
The events of the first day revealed the seething anger of the rank and file at the policy of alliance with the ANC, which has been swelling for decades now, as we all know too well. The open defiance of delegates can only indicate that the leadership is increasingly failing to contain and manage this anger.
Falling wages, rising costs of living and poverty of the working class
Many of those delegates who heckled Mantashe were from public sector unions, who are angry at the savagery of neoliberal cuts on the working conditions by the ANC government, which has wreaked the collective bargaining agreement of 2018 when it refused to pay the last of the three years wage increases. Last year there were no real wage increases, and currently it is offering public servants a pitiful 3 percent against the 13 years high inflation rate that has long broken through a target range of 3 to 6 percent.
Workers in the private sectors including his former union, National Union of Mineworkers are also extremely unhappy at the refusal of government and its Department of Mineral Resources to intervene in many disputes including Sibanye-Stillwater, where the CEO was paid R300 million due to massive increases in profits, whilst the mine vigorously opposed the 7 percent increase.
COSATU’s 14th National Congress is also taking place in a year characterized by rolling blackouts, record breaking unemployment and petrol prices. Additionally, the congress comes weeks after the national shutdown and within months of the ANC’s elective conference. All these are fuelling the anger of Cosatu rank and file which exploded in the plenary of the congress.
Cosatu must break from the Alliance
Many of the workers including COSATU members and community activists expressed the same sentiment during demonstrations on the day of the National shutdown, the 24th of August 2022. Many workers were angry, and frustrated at the absurdity of COSATU’s leadership to invite the ANC, as part of alliance partners, to march with them against the ANC government.
Quite correctly, they reasoned that COSATU leadership and the ANC cannot bark with the hounds and run with the hare. A serious working class struggle for a living and social wage will not only be without the support of the ANC but in opposition against it, the neoliberal austerity measures and the ANC government implementing them.
The workers movement was a powerful force in the struggle against apartheid, with COSATU leading the calls for socialism. However, the federation surrendered its political autonomy in order to remain in the tripartite alliance with the ANC and SACP. This cleared the way for the ruling class to lead the country down a neoliberal path after apartheid. COSATU’s support ensured that the ANC maintained a majority in Parliament despite these. However, the ruling party’s betrayal is clear in the implementation of the neoliberal GEAR, Marikana massacre and State Capture. These betrayals are not lost on the workers, but provide a glimpse of the basis of the working class anger and rejection of the ANC.
Economic policy in South Africa follows the direction given by institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and rating agencies. COSATU’s leadership led many workers to support an alliance that does not serve them. Blind faith in the alliance is not an option for the working class. Recent election results show decreasing support for the ANC as more people become disillusioned by the false promises, corruption and mismanagement of the economy.
Although the congress will probably decide who COSATU will support in the ANC’s upcoming elective conference, workers are clearly dissatisfied with the ruling party, its corrupt, incomptent and neoliberal mismanagement of the public services, and the capitalist system of corporate profiteering over the economy as a whole. Sibanye Stillwater gold mine workers who went on strike openly aired their disappointment with the ANC, as did many COSATU members before and after them. The solidarity shown by workers from AMCU and NUM was a key feature of the strike coming from the recognition that the bosses are the enemy. Public sector workers are rightly frustrated by the government’s failure to implement a living wage. In 28 years, the ANC has failed to invest in communities, public education, healthcare and infrastructure leading to further discontent, especially from working class community civics, who have long broken with the alliance, and SANCO leadership which chose ANC over the struggles of communities,
Trade unions gain their strength from having a base among workers, the layer of the population that produces the goods and services enabling society to survive. However, over time a gap has emerged between the workers and their leaderships, not only in COSATU but across the movement. The emergence of bureaucrats in unions and class collaborators presents the workers with several challenges, such as understanding how the bureaucracy emerges in the first place and how to overcome it.
Elections of trade union officials on the basis of the right of immediate recall, and wages equivalent to those of skilled workers in the industries they organise is an important way of overcoming these problems. The fundamental problem of COSATU is however mainly a crisis of political direction and leadership.
For a mass workers party on a socialist programme
COSATU must break from the alliance with the ANC, and campaign for a creation of a mass political party of the working class, on the basis of a programme for a socialist transformation of society.
By breaking from the alliance, and reclaiming its socialist tradition, COSATU will also be able to reclaim its position as the unifying force of the working class, as it did in the struggle against apartheid. It will be able to revitalize itself, and structures as a mass campaigning trade union federation, enjoying the confidence of its rank and file membership. Breaking from the ANC, will provide the possibility of reunifying the organised labour movement, which is currently fragmented and weakened by divisions into five federations.
Above, all it will regain and strengthen position and role of the organised labour movement within the broader working class, and to reassert the working class leadership of society, which is a desperate and urgent necessity in the face of moral decay of the political and corporate elite, as well as the deepening social and ecological crises of capitalism.