Battle for soul of Cosatu is not over

This week’s Cosatu special national congress (SNC) was ultimately a victory for a well-organised political faction. This faction has a name: it is the South African Communist Party (SACP).

For the SACP the Cosatu boss –  S’dumo Dlamini, who  sits on the SACP central committee and politburo – is a central cog in maintaining its dominance over Cosatu.

And Dlamini not only prevailed against the progressive bloc,  but is now able to claim a mass worker rejection of the political critique of the role of the SACP that the progressive bloc put forward.

But while  its victory was overwhelming, it would be short-term, self-blinding triumphalism on the part of the SACP to believe that the battle for an independent, democratic, worker-controlled and socialist trade union movement is over. Or for it to think that workers will forever follow its lead without understanding and challenging its anti-working class role.

While the SACP victors  celebrate, the progressive bloc in Cosatu has not capitulated. It came out with a militant statement conceding defeat but underlining that the fight for the soul of Cosatu is not over.

The reality is that thanks to the SACP and trade union bureaucratisation, Cosatu has long since left the terrain of principle and working class struggle.

From the 1990s, the SACP captured Cosatu and proceeded to subordinate it to the ANC.

This was deepened at the ANC’s Mangaung national conference in 2012 through the election of Cosatu leaders to the ANC national executive committee (NEC). Previously, the co-option of trade union leaders was primarily through seats in parliament. But given the worsening social, economic and political crises in our country, there had to be tighter political control of Cosatu through the ANC NEC.

This has sacrificed working class independence for an accommodation with capital, with disastrous results for workers. Thus the SACP victory at this week’s Cosatu SNC was not one for workers and their interests.

That said, it would be foolhardy to ignore the reality that the mass of workers in Cosatu still look to the SACP and Cosatu. For now.

The question is, where to next?

In the short-term, the next arena of contest  between the SACP faction and the progressive bloc has to be the ordinary congress of Cosatu scheduled for November.

Most unions and their members still believe Cosatu is the federation of the working class.   There is  however, a latent rank and file revolt brewing across the entire working class against bureaucratised and politically pliant trade union leadership which is also responsible for failing to service workers.

Trade union decay can be seen in the majority of trade unions that are against Numsa. Worker rebellions can be seen in the split of Samwu, the Ceppwawu battles, the Eastern Cape split in Sadtu, the split in Satawu and the emergence of the South African Public Service Union.

The organisational and political maturation of this simmering worker rebellion has the potential to be taken a lot further.

A sustained fight in Cosatu is also crucial to build the foundation for maintaining the maximum unity of organised workers in the long-term.

Whilst a split may be inevitable after the November congress, it is the workers who ultimately have to find each other and join up in their common struggle, even if this entails an initial break with the identity of Cosatu.

A challenge to the current leadership of Cosatu that takes steps towards a new federation cannot simply be for the sake of preferring different individual leaders.

Primarily, there is a need to re-configure and reinvigorate the traditions of democratic worker control, working class independence, service to workers, revolutionary trade unionism and worker militancy. For these priorities to be reborn, the workers have to matter most. They have to be the social base, the locomotive and heartbeat of a reinvigorated trade union movement.

Critically important in ultimately deciding the outcome of these organisational struggles of workers is numerical strength, social weight, political traditions and fighting capacity of advanced workers.

Another aspect of the battle has to concern workers’ demands and struggles against labour-broking and for a living wage.

Some may argue that a sustained fight in Cosatu runs the risk of losing the faith of militant workers within and without Cosatu, and that there are many more workers outside of Cosatu than inside Cosatu who could be organised. This may be true, but the rebirth and rebuilding of the trade union movement must rest on the solid foundations of deep mass working class ownership.

It took at least 12 years for Cosatu to be formed. If the progressive bloc is to prevail in this struggle, another four months on the historical calendar is moot.

The continuation of the battle within Cosatu is important for another reason:  to effectively expose workers to the authoritarianism of the SACP faction and help them reach new programmatic conclusions from their own experience.

The “Back to Basics” platitudes of Cosatu boss S’dumo Dlamini do not change the lack of political will or provide programmatic commitment to build a democratic, worker-controlled trade union movement that is simultaneously independent, revolutionary, radical and services its members on the shop-floor as its main priority.

The challenge for the progressive bloc therefore, is to take forward the internal Cosatu fight on the basis of honesty, sustained hard work, effective strategy and handing power back to workers.

As the SACP is wont to do, it will attack and even undertake destabilisation, working against Numsa and the other parts of the progressive bloc. These will require a sustained and disciplined defence in which strong shop-floor organisation will be key.

In attempting to secure its hegemony over Cosatu, the SACP will also seek to reassert workers’ victories over the last 21 years. And indeed, over the last 21 years workers won in the battle for the Labour Relations Act, the Basic Conditions of Employment Act, the Employment Equity Act, the Skills Development Act, affirmative action, minimum wages for farm and domestic workers, and obtained some other improvements in wages and working conditions.

However, these victories for workers were immediately undermined by the unchallenged power of employers.

Employers responded with the restructuring and informalisation of work which weakened the collective power and positions of workers.

This was done through retrenchments, casualisation, outsourcing, labour broking and theft of workers’ wages.

Workers’ wages were stolen through a sustained decline in the wage share of national income whilst the average productivity of each worker increased. This process meant more and more profits for the employers.

Also important to underline is that these celebrated labour laws were actually a product of negotiated compromise. This meant they were ultimately about some measure of “regulated flexibility” (according to Jeremy Baskin and Vishwas Satgar).

The compromised labour laws do not control the power of employers. Because of the economic power of employers, the labour laws have proved unable to stop worsening conditions for workers.

The employers’ offensive against  workers was driven by the conscious and deliberate political agency of the ANC, as the governing party.

Whilst paying lip service to worker interests, ultimately the ANC government has undermined the very labour laws that it passed by allowing retrenchments, outsourcing and informalisation of work.

It permitted these in the belief that this would attract investment. Even though it would never admit this, it also allowed these to basically achieve a de facto two-tier labour market as demanded by some employers.

This was confirmed by the passing of the youth wage subsidy law to basically subsidise profit-making by employers who promise to employ young people. As research on the impact of this subsidy law has shown, it has not created any jobs for young people.

In the mid-1990s the ANC’s commitment to liberalisation was seen through the liberalisation of trade policy, in particular tariffs and imports. This aimed at dismantling the protections that sheltered local industry – and in turn decimated jobs in the clothing and textile sector, and parts of manufacturing.

The political agency of the ANC government in promoting a neo-liberal restructuring of work would have been checked and stopped had the SACP and Cosatu been willing to put worker interests first.

Many workers do not sufficiently appreciate this duplicity.

And this is the danger that the SACP victory in the Cosatu SNC continues to present.

The same  SACP  that at its own conference heaped praise all over the richest ANC deputy president to ever hold office and the man who featured large in the Marikana massacre  – Cyril Ramaphosa.

Mazibuko Jara is the national secretary of the United Front