The changing politics of South African labour can cast light on the make-up, consciousness and psychology of the working class. In doing so it provides a lens for understanding the broader political conjuncture defined by the Marikana massacre of August 2012 and the December 2013 National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) decision to break with the ruling African National Congress.
But one of the defining features of this conjuncture – exemplified by Marikana – is precisely that such a necessary continuity between ‘working class’ and ‘the labour movement’, as its principal organisational expression, let alone the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) as its epicentre in South Africa, cannot be presumed.
The Marikana moment and its aftermath – the 2012 national strike wave that it unleashed, in particular – were driven by workers in opposition to, and outside of, COSATU and its affiliates. And South Africa has experienced nearly 15 years of unbroken protests by working-class communities all over the country – dubbed the ‘rebellion of the poor’ by the University of Johannesburg's Chair of Social Change – which have certainly shaped the political conjuncture without the involvement of the labour movement, and certainly not COSATU.
And the most politically significant strike in recent South African history – the 2014 platinum workers’ strike – is certainly changing both the politics of South African labour as well as the national politics of the country – witness the rise of the Economic Freedom fighters (EFF) – which drew on the militancy on the platinum belt and some of the community flashpoints. Yet one cannot understand these developments starting from a trade union lens.
This contribution to debate claims that understanding the changing politics of labour requires us to often step outside the confines of the trade unions and to not even take the trade unions as a point of departure. I also argue that therefore we should not use trade unions as a lens for viewing the politics of the working-class developments and thereby the politics of the current conjuncture.
Instead I privilege the changing organisational make-up of the working class and the changing political consciousness of a new movement of class struggle emerging today. I assess events such as the NUMSA moment, the COSATU internal crisis, the emergence of the Amalgamated Mining and Construction Workers’ Union (AMCU) and the changing national political landscape against these yardsticks.
The two biggest signifiers of South Africa's labour movement in 2015 are, on the one hand, a terminal crisis within what is still, formally, the biggest trade union centre – COSATU – aligned to the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), and, on the other, the emergence of new workplace militancies by workers. These latter are notably the national strike wave in the second half of 2012 and the victorious strike by 70,000 platinum mineworkers in 2014, acting outside COSATU and sometimes outside the industrial relations machinery associated with COSATU's gains in the early 1990s.
For nearly five months 70, 000 workers went on strike, the longest mining strike in South Africa, in the platinum sector.1 Many victims of the violence perpetrated by the state against workers at Marikana in August 2012 took a firm stand to fight for a minimum wage of R12,500 per month. This figure had taken on enormous symbolic meaning as it was the demand of the rock drill workers who went on strike in 2012 and were killed by the police at Marikana. It was thus not the ordinary shifting goal of traditional wage negotiations. Workers who had experienced the Marikana massacre wanted to raise the bar for the generations to come.
Thousands of workers returned home to some of the traditional source areas of migrant labour, seeking to survive. Others simply suffered relying on family and neighbours to keep them going in the townships and settlements of the North West and Limpopo provinces. The stakes were high. And the strike had broader political significance as AMCU was a union formed out of a breakaway from the COSATU-aligned National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the union from which the Deputy President and the Secretary General of the ANC emerged. The political challenge of the strike was clear from day one as the ruling party and its Tripartite Alliance allies sought not only to discredit the strike in the eyes of public opinion – a strategy that continues long after the strike was over – but to crush AMCU.
There was every sign that the platinum bosses did not want a settlement and did not expect such resilience from workers. For the first three months they continued to sell platinum out of reserves hoarded before the strike and from other sources at prices agreed before the strike. Having nearly 80% of the world's platinum reserves, the three companies are a de facto cartel able to manipulate prices simply by controlling output.
The platinum workers of AMCU faced hostility from the labour movement and were a direct challenge to the erstwhile liberation movement. And yet they won a famous victory.
In the meantime COSATU has sunk deeper into a quagmire. Its biggest affiliate – NUMSA – was expelled for breaking with the ANC, while nine affiliates called on the President to convene a Special Congress, a call which was ignored though it is a constitutional requirement. The South African Municipal Workers' Union (SAMWU), workers and staff occupied its head office in protest at allegations that over R160 million had gone missing. The teachers’ union, SADTU, expelled its president, who was deemed to be too close to erstwhile suspended COSATU General Secretary, Zwelenzima Vavi.2
The ex-biggest affiliate, NUM, collapsed in the platinum sector and has only held on to gold workers by dint of centralised bargaining with the Chamber of Mines. And the chemical union, CEPPWAWU, is threatened with de-registration by the Department of Labour for failing to submit regular membership updates.
And yet, far from the demise of COSATU occurring in a period of a lull in mass politics or a new defeat of the working class, it is occurring when a new movement is on the rise. It is just that COSATU is not part of this new movement. We need to trace this disjuncture between the demise of COSATU and the rise of a new movement by cutting through layers of contemporary history, and through at least three levels of analysis.
The Zuma Project and COSATU's demise
The immediate, first level can be traced to the make-up of disgruntled forces which overthrew ANC and South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki. The South African Communist Party (SACP), COSATU and the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) were a coterie of conspirators which made a pact with Jacob Zuma that, in return for seats at the table of the state, they would champion a deeply flawed individual into the highest office. Since Jacob Zuma's ascendancy into power at Polokwane and the subsequent 2009 elections which made him president of the country, there has been increased tension within affiliates of COSATU and between some leaders and the SACP.
The Central Executive Committee of COSATU suspended Zwelenzima Vavi on charges of sexual impropriety, amidst open contestation between NUMSA – on the side of Vavi – and NUM, SADTU and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) – aligned with SACP Central Committee members, President S'dumo Dlamini and NUM's Frans Baleni. Mbeki had no truck with those for whom the state was merely a vehicle for private wealth projects – and lost little time in dealing with his own deputy president who was caught doing precisely that. But this opened the door for a layer of disgruntled elements – some with their own agendas of seeking a state for rentier capitalism; others with political axes to grind. These forces rallied together behind the SACP, COSATU and the ANCYL to drive Mbeki out after making a Faustian pact with Zuma.
That agenda had little to do with some kind of Left–Right programmatic tension within the ANC, or that Zuma, as against Mbeki, was a more ‘pro-poor candidate’. It was instead about a series of manoeuvres to get into influential positions in the state machinery.
A decisive ingredient in these developments and over a number of years has been the South African Communist Party. All the senior leadership of COSATU and most of its affiliates are SACP members. The SACP and its National Democratic Revolution – in which the ‘first’ stage would be a capitalist democracy presided over by the ANC – has long abandoned any notions of socialism, beyond the occasional rhetorical flourishes, and has become completely integrated into an avowedly capitalist state. Both its general secretaries are Cabinet ministers under Zuma. And even under Mbeki and Mandela, the secret in ANC circles was always to appoint SACP heavyweights as senior Cabinet ministers who had unpopular tasks to carry out – privatisation, e-tolling3 and so on. The Communist Party has comfortably combined the rhetoric of socialism at May Day rallies with implementing neoliberal policies in government.
But increasingly the Mbeki presidency was marked by greater centralisation of power not only within government but within the ANC itself, and the two became indistinguishable. And so the space for SACP luminaries to staff key government policy portfolios became limited and Mbeki used to delight in showing his ability to use the SACP's own ‘Marxist-sounding’ language against them, to slap them down. So under the Mbeki regime the SACP coined the term the ‘Class of ’96' – unnamed ANC and business interests who were blamed for the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR), the government's neo-liberal economic policy unveiled in 1996, and its programme. But that ‘Class of '96’, according to the SACP, would have its way if the SACP and COSATU did not continue to support an ANC government.
Underlying this loyalty was an increasing integration of the SACP into state structures – like Parliament, the Cabinet, the provincial and local government structures, the development agencies. This layer of formal and political leadership sits like a dead weight on the lives of ordinary members of individual COSATU affiliates.
With Zuma's victory over Mbeki, both the SACP and COSATU got appropriately rewarded with Cabinet minister appointments. Julius Malema's Youth League got its own rewards in the form of both Cabinet ministers and lucrative business tenders from national and provincial governments. But whereas Malema's sin was ingratitude and over ambitiousness, Vavi's was to renege on an assurance to move on from COSATU General Secretary in 2010 and not covet General Secretary, Blade Nzimande's leadership position in the SACP. So the SACP's Stalinist hands have been itching to get at Vavi since then. Vavi's abuse of power and sexual indiscretions provided the SACP with the necessary ammunition.
Meanwhile, throughout the Mbeki years, the victims of his neoliberalism – the new working class of urban and rural poor have been in increasing revolt – a revolt of service-delivery protests was carried out beneath the radar of middle-class public opinion. The system of labour relations and compliant trade unions kept a lid on the rising dissatisfaction in the industrial sphere. Until the revolts spilled over into the communities surrounding the platinum mines in the North West, and found a disgraced NUM incapable of having any moral authority to police the dissent. And then came Marikana.
And what did the Zuma project deliver? Cabinet positions for individual COSATU, SACP and ANCYL leaders, and then a veritable culture of cronyism and looting of the state. And then the ladder of advancement was whisked away, and when Julius Malema over reached himself he was expelled with a subsequent unravelling of the erstwhile unified forces of disgruntlement.
But whereas this fall-out was the immediate cause of the demise of COSATU, we can see at a much deeper level. The demise was also linked to COSATU's corrupting niche in the new dispensation after 1994.
Growing corruption and the industrial relations framework after 1994
After the Marikana massacre, President Jacob Zuma appointed the Farlam Commission and also convened an emergency Social Dialogue meeting of Business, Labour and Government in October 2012. The partners released a statement calling on strikers to return to work and for the police to defend law and order, noting that ‘the wave of unprotected strikes … [could] … undermine the legal framework of bargaining' (statement issued by Social Dialogue meeting).4
But what did this ‘legal framework of bargaining’ deliver? From the viewpoint of peace and productivity it has certainly done its job. Strikes have shown a steady decline since 1995 – with only 2010 and 2012 being exceptions. 2010 was the year of public sector strikes as unions and state departments found themselves at the end of a three-year agreement in that year, shown by an increase in the number of strikes and days lost. The 2012 strike wave after Marikana was conducted outside of, and in opposition to, the industrial relations framework.
The Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration, in the meantime, has increased its case handling exponentially, and has become an established part of the industrial relations landscape. But from the side of ordinary working-class people the system has been a disaster on every score. First, at the macro level, inequality is increasing and all the indicators show increased unemployment – peaking at near 40% – and the increased informalisation and casualisation of workers. The labour peace has come at the cost of the restructuring of the working class towards the very flexible labour demanded by Big Business.
Overall, workers’ wages and salaries as a percentage of national income have been dropping every year and were overtaken in 1999 by profits. In other words, there has been a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the era of the current industrial relations system.
But, notwithstanding this, there has been one area in which black workers have benefited. This is the policy of affirmative action applied in the public sector. It has meant that a whole layer of black workers employed in local, provincial and national government departments, in the police, in the parastatals and in other services, the skilled employees (as opposed to those who have found themselves in outsourced services which straddle the ‘public–private divide’), have moved into white-collar jobs and into lower- and middle-management in the public sector. In this way the plethora of levels of government and its associated public–private partnerships have been able to move black people into spaces formerly the domain of whites. They are the beneficiaries of the new post-apartheid South Africa and a significant component of COSATU membership today.
And then there is Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).Whereas the ANC government formalised and accelerated BEE after 1994 and made this a condition of state tenders and included it in crucial pieces of legislation such as the Mineral Rights Act, BEE was first initiated by Sanlam's Metropolitan Life and then by Anglo American before 1994. Apart from the first layer of beneficiaries such as the Motlanas, an important feature of Anglo's unbundling was to seek a partnership with the unions for its wholly owned company Johannesburg Consolidated Investments (JCI) and its mining operations. NUM started this partnership, using its access to workers’ provident funds and setting up its own investment company. This was followed by the South African Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (SACTWU) and the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers' Union (SACCAWU) and practically every COSATU affiliate, including COSATU itself in setting up Kopano ke Matla.
Apart from the contradiction of trade unions becoming capitalists, the investment company scenario and the takeover of provident funds also became a corrupting milieu. This was a milieu of perks for office bearers and shop stewards sitting on Boards and being paid attendance fees and emoluments. With union membership and leadership distant from the critical issues facing the working class, COSATU has become a home for careerism and a pathway for senior leaders to move into government and into the Cabinet. The case of NUM, so graphically revealed after Marikana – where the worker leaders were full-time shop stewards on the payroll of the companies, enjoying perks, and the union even owning shares in the bank that loaned money to workers – is not an exception. It is replicated in other unions in the way in which all have investment companies and are schooled on the circuits of negotiating fora, Alliance meetings and so on.
COSATU and the changing composition of the working class
At its deepest level, the underlying causes for the problems within COSATU lie in the major structural changes that have happened to the working class over the last 20 years of neoliberal capitalism and the realignment of COSATU's membership.
In that period, the neoliberal attacks on the working class have seen a shift away from full employment and fixed employment towards informalisation and unemployment in the case of the world of work. There has also been the abandonment by the state of the sphere of reproduction of the working class – from apartheid brick houses in townships to shacks in informal settlements; from Bantu education to no education or privatised education; from discriminatory services to no services or commodified services – beyond the reach of the poor. As a result the working class in South Africa is now largely an underemployed, casualised, semi-homeless mass.5
Neoliberalism was above all a strategy on the part of capital to respond to the crisis of overproduction and over-accumulation which threatened profitability from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Much has been made of the features of this form of capital accumulation – mobile finance capital, accumulation by dispossession, new roles for the state and so on. Many of these features are being sharply illustrated by the current global crisis. But the restructuring of social relations that is neoliberalism also included quite fundamental changes to the labour process: from millions of workers being driven out of the labour process itself (into unemployment), to a variety of forms of externalisation and labour flexibility, part-time work, home work, casualisation and outsourcing. These changes have also seen work become increasingly feminised and more vulnerable sections of the working class – immigrants and refugees for instance – being particularly susceptible to the most extreme forms of labour flexibility. Frequently in cases such as outsourcing to home workers, the point of production has become blurred with residential spaces.
Neoliberalism has equally been about the restructuring of the sphere of reproduction of the working class. The cuts in public services and social spending on public health, education, housing and health and the commercialisation and privatisation of water, energy and housing are practised by almost all states across the world. This has cast the burden of reproduction of the working class largely back onto the working class itself, particularly working-class women.
These changes in both the sphere of production and the sphere of reproduction have engendered something quite fundamental – a change in the composition of the working class, and a shift in the centre of gravity of struggles.
In South Africa, the last 25 years of neoliberal policies – privatisation and commercialisation, cuts in social services and their intensification by the ANC government after 1996, have had devastating effects on the working class. Unemployment levels average 36% across the country but reach levels of 60 to 80% in rural areas and the poorer provinces. People in rural areas now rely entirely on welfare grants and remittances from already poor workers in the cities.
Faced in 1994 with a backlog of 1.5 million houses, the ANC government largely abandoned any programme of public housing. The apartheid regime had stopped building houses in 1982, so there was already a housing crisis. The new government adopted a policy of providing subsidies to people to buy houses from private and state developers with loans from the banks. Today the government claims to have provided housing by using the term ‘housing opportunities’. This means that those who have taken advantage of the ‘housing opportunities’ are in debt, others are on endless waiting lists to qualify for the minuscule rental stock, whilst millions are abandoned to informal settlements or living as backyard dwellers.
Rural livelihoods have collapsed and as a result South Africa's small towns – the Balfours, the Howicks, the Sebokengs – have become rural ghettos of the unemployed, the youth and women. And in urban areas the older brick-house townships have become enveloped in new camps and backyard dwellings. As a result, it is not so much the older apartheid townships like the Sowetos, Tembisas, Botshabelos or Mdantsanes which are the nerve centres of protest, but newer settlements like the Diepsloots, the Site Cs and the Bekkersdals.
Twenty years of neoliberalism and globalisation have reconfigured the working class in South Africa – a class of casualised and informalised workers, of the unemployed, of never-employed youth, of commuter women and of backyard-dwellers. Older movements, like most of the trade unions, are no longer representative of these sections of the working class, which today constitute the majority. More importantly, these older movements no longer even act as a register of such struggles.
This reconfiguration of the working class across the spheres of both production and reproduction fuelled two of the most dramatic strikes of the 2012 strike wave. The strikes on the platinum belt, and the emblematic demand for R12,500, were stoked both by the wage issue and by the fact that the platinum companies had abandoned the old hostels of the compound labour system and instead paid workers a ‘living out’ allowance. In the absence of houses or services supplied by local authorities, migrant workers set up informal settlements and lived in squalid camps around Rustenburg without water, electricity or sewerage. There was a seamless continuity, or rather a toxic cocktail of ‘workplace’ and ‘community issues’ that came together to fuel their militancy.
Similarly, the 2012 farm workers’ strike in the Western Cape combined the experience of full-time workers on the wine farms with a high degree of seasonal workers in other agricultural sectors who did not live on the farms and were only occasionally employed. These workers lived in informal settlements near the farms but close to the small towns. It was their militancy and mobility that spread the strike and gave it momentum.
COSATU in the meanwhile has also changed in composition. It has moved from a largely blue-collar, working-class formation in the 1980s and 1990s to a largely public sector, white-collar federation. This is reflected in studies done by its own research arm, Naledi, as well as by CASE (Community Agency for Social Enquiry). Until Marikana, NUM was the biggest single union. But NUM has moved on from a union of coal-face workers, to a union of white-collar, above-ground technicians. Outside of NUMSA, the bulk of COSATU membership is now drawn from NEHAWU, SADTU, the Communication Workers’ Union, SAMWU and Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (POPCRU) amongst others. Nearly one-third of COSATU members now have degrees.6
COSATU is reduced to a morally compromised coterie of middle-class leaders hanging on to state institutions, negotiations fora and investments companies. It is implicated in engineering political career-pathing and it was, so to speak, an accident waiting to happen. The break-up of the Zuma pact has only accelerated an incorrigible rot. It is to NUMSA's credit that it is showing militant defiance to this caricature of what was once a noble force.
NUMSA, however, is caught in a conundrum. On the one hand, it is pitching its tent on the ground of the United Front – an initiative to seek common ground with the masses in instances of existing working-class struggles in communities and workplaces. And yet it is held captive by the need to honour its obligations to save COSATU from itself. Having done so much to inspire activists with its Special Congress resolutions of December 2013, it is in danger of misreading the mood in the country amongst working-class militants. This is because it keeps its focus on the rot in COSATU, whether Vavi gets his job back or not; whether a Special Congress will be held or not; and whether the ANC's ‘mediation’ should be allowed to take its course or not.
In a way it is caught in a very traditional notion on the Left. This is that the trade unions are the very stuff of working-class life and that any hope of taking the next step towards socialism depends on privileging the trade unions as the most organised force of the working class. Some continue to conflate the concept ‘working class' with those in full-time jobs and assume that this section of the working class is given expression by trade unions. Others who have criticised these assumptions point out that trade union densities can differ over time and that seldom have trade unions involved a majority of workers in their membership.
Both perspectives however continue to privilege the trade union as the unit of analysis in understanding the behaviour of the working class and how it may act as a social force. But is this conceptually and historically true? Over the course of its formation and history the working class has thrown up a plethora of different kinds of organisations. These vary from benefit societies, clubs, cultural groups, cooperatives and trade unions to political parties and social movements. In no country in the world is the trade union taken as the majority organisational expression of workers, even among employed workers. To be sure, South Africa has a relatively large trade union density – at nearly 30% – but in some major industrialised countries – such as the USA – this can drop to less than 6%.
Nevertheless, despite this ‘numbers question’ many on the Left have argued that trade unions are unique amongst all the different forms of working-class organisation in that they contest the terms of exploitation of the working class so their social weight and significance are far greater than their numbers. But is that always historically true? That trade unions have played this role more than other organisational forms? Far from being less about contestation of the exploitation of the working class, some organisations have at various times played a greater role than trade unions in contesting that exploitation.
In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, workers who had set up trade unions but had no political party helped to establish the Labour Party. And then, as the parliamentary party shifted towards the centre, the trade unions, with membership greater than the Labour Party, often occupied a space to the left of the party. In Germany, however, the original Social Democratic Party preceded the trade unions and vastly exceeded them in terms of membership. There the trade unions occupied a space on the extreme right wing of the party. In Brazil in the 1980s the trade unions set up the Workers' Party (the Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT). When Lula came into power and shifted the PT to the right, the labour unions of the Central Única dos Trabalhadores were dragged rightwards with Lula. It was a social movement, the MST (the landless workers' movement), that became more representative of the working class and the dispossessed.
In the South Africa of the 1920s, it was the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU) which was most representative of the working class, although it was only nominally a trade union and was rather, in today's language, a social movement of the urban and rural poor. When it was compelled to become a ‘proper’ trade union under the advice of William Ballinger in 1929, it collapsed. More recently in South Africa, community-based social movements have been at the forefront of working-class struggles while the trade unions have largely stuck to Labour Relations Act-regulated wage struggles and generally ensured labour peace.
So there is no consistency in the historical record that suggests that trade unions are the primordial organisations of the working class or that they are the ones most devoted, by their very nature, to contesting the exploitation of the working class. And yet, despite this evidence, so many on the Left would argue the centrality of the trade unions from ‘first principles’, from theory, because they falsely conclude that the exploitation of the working class occurs ‘at the point of production’.
But not only has 30 years of neoliberalism changed the ‘point of production', this assumption ignores the fact that exploitation is both a ‘production’ and a social reproduction issue. Class struggle is waged across the whole circuit of capital and certainly within both the spheres of production and reproduction. So a working class contesting its exploitation and anchoring a movement for socialism is not dependent on the existence, in some kind of an a priori ‘first principles’ sense, of trade unions. What is important is the need for concrete analysis of struggles at any given time rather than a matter of drawing on ‘first principles’.
Working-class struggles in South Africa
Since the beginning of 2014, the number of community struggles has increased to almost four instances of protests per day. In almost every part of the country, community activists are protesting against water cut-offs, no services and poor housing, expressing their anger that 20 years after the end of apartheid the quality of life for the poorest sections of the working class has got worse.
From Mthotlung to Valhalla Park, from the North West and Limpopo to KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, these struggles can no longer be dismissed by commentators as just ‘service delivery protests’ or ‘popcorn’ struggles. This is a movement, a rebellion of the poor. A movement of the unemployed, of shack-dwellers and of small towns across the country. The striking platinum workers of AMCU standing up against the whole gamut of mine bosses; the state and the strike-breaking unions are now lined up alongside the protesting communities in Bekkersdal, Burgersfort and Siqalo, reshaping South African politics and competing with the ANC for the hearts and minds of the working class. The protests have drawn in NUMSA and even cast a different light on the EFF because it speaks the language of the movements.
The working-class community struggles of the last 10–15 years have themselves gone through ebbs and flows. All of these moments are notable for some common features: they have been localised, they have been largely borne by the unemployed, the youth and by women; they were led by activists who had no connection or experience with the past anti-apartheid movement struggles and they have not forged their own unifying political identity, let alone organisation. Instead it has been others who have attempted to establish this for them by filling the leadership vacuum. In these attempts at forging a leadership on their behalf, one can discern three phases.
Between 1994 and 2002 the old Left within the Congress milieu largely ignored the struggles or dismissed them as opportunist and hostile to the ANC. The first to ‘discover’ the struggles were other left-wing intellectuals informed by ideas of ‘new social movements’ and eager to see in these struggles the affirmation of their own theories.
When the struggles continued, two sections of the old Left stepped in. From the Left in the Congress Alliance, resolutions started being passed that COSATU and/or the SACP branches should ‘provide leadership’ which they hardly were able to do given their social distance from these struggles. Given this distance, the space was filled with the ‘independent Left’ who had considerable experience of the anti-apartheid struggles. The zenith of this experience was the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF) in Gauteng, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Landless People's Movement (LPM). The two global meeting places in South Africa – the World Conference on Racism in 2001 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 – provided opportunities to round up activists and make a spectacular statement. The spectacle of a mass march to Sandton in 2002, in direct competition with a failed ANC–COSATU counter march, and a new generation of activists who had become rapidly schooled in the language of socialism, proved inspiring. A smaller-scale instance – the Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbH) in Durban – was similarly claimed as an iconic instance by some new left intellectuals. This continued until the Kennedy Road killings in 2009 and allegations that the intellectuals were indulging in delusions. Intellectuals associated with the AbH split at this time and gave directly opposing interpretations – from blaming ANC aligned forces to infighting amongst Kennedy Road residents.7
Yet the ongoing local struggles continued and spread across the country and a strange irony occurred. Far from the heightened and more widespread struggles strengthening the official ‘social movements' – the APF, LPM, TAC, AbH – they declined in influence and as centres of militancy. By 2010–11 the ‘social movements’ had collapsed and yet the community struggles actually increased in scale and intensity.
These community struggles were joined in 2012 by the post-Marikana industrial strike wave and the farmworkers’ strike. Left groups associated with what became the Workers and Socialists Party were the closest of any experienced activists to the plethora of self-organised strike committees of the platinum belt. Yet they seemed to have diverted attention to their own political party rather than helped to strengthen the strike committees, and a National Strike Committee was largely abandoned.
Out of the Marikana massacre, AMCU has taken over from NUM as the voice of workers in the strategically important platinum mining sector and led the 2014 platinum strike. Only a court order stopped the union from challenging NUM's majority in the gold sector and having a strike there too. The 2014 strike however was different from the spontaneous strike wave of 2012, which was self-organised by workers’ strike committees and was outside the framework of the traditional unions and the Labour Relations Act.
But the striking workers reaped the whirlwind that was sown by the Marikana massacre. They were the inheritors of the self-organised strike committees who sparked the 2012 and 2013 strike wave that drew in 100,000 workers across the country. AMCU, in turn, was formed by ex-NUM officials unfairly dismissed by the union, and disgruntled workers sick of NUM's cosy, sweetheart relations with the mine bosses8. Apart from this it is quite a ‘traditional’ union, apolitical and an affiliate of the National Council of Trade Unions.
Some commentators have bemoaned AMCU's lack of structures and its apparent unpreparedness for a strike of these dimensions. AMCU was ill-equipped and its pressure on the new members to disband the strike committees and to elect shop stewards in the traditions of NUM was not what workers expected. But its lack of structures and its ‘inexperience’ may be precisely what made it difficult for the AMCU leadership to impose a settlement on its own members. Unlike the corporate versions of events, it was not AMCU leaders keeping workers out of work by ‘deluding’ them or making false promises. Rather it was the stubborn, uncompromising workers who held the AMCU leadership accountable and who defied the mine bosses’ attempts to divide them by texting workers directly.
The near-demise of COSATU and the failures of ‘social movements’ such as APF, LPM and TAC is not in the context of a retreating working class or a rightward shift in the balance of forces, or even a consolidation of the ANC, but comes about in the context of a rising tide of struggles.
This tension between a growing movement and yet the absence of appropriate forms of organisation which can unify struggles and give political voice to this growing movement, is the most significant feature of this period in 2014.
The short answer to the question, what is changing the politics of the labour movement in South Africa, is one of reconfiguration. On the one hand we have the decline, possibly terminal, of the older, industrial trade unions, chiefly COSATU and its affiliates, as a social force for change. This is because they have largely become lower middle-class formations and their leaders have become extensions of the machinery of the state. On the other hand, the processes of fragmentation amongst the restructured working class have seen the rise of a new movement of militancy in which working-class activists pursue struggles in both the spheres of production and reproduction, and in new forms of self-organisation that have the capacity to link these different spheres of working-class life.
As yet, these struggles lack some kind of unified political expression. This does not mean that these struggles have not changed the political landscape of post-apartheid South Africa indelibly. The two best known instances of public awareness of political shifts in South Africa, the rise of the EFF, as a force to the left of the ANC and its relative electoral success on the basis of a Left programme in the 2014 elections, and the NUMSA moment, with all its promise of a socialist party, are indices, products, outcomes, not driving forces, of this changing political landscape.