The rebellion of the poor

Over the course of its history, the working class has thrown up all sorts of different kinds of organisations, from benefit societies to clubs, cultural groups, co-operatives and trade unions, political parties and social movements.

In South Africa, community-based social movements have been at the forefront of working class struggles, while the trade unions have largely stuck to wage struggles and generally insured labour peace.

From Mthotlung to Valhalla Park, from the North West and Limpopo to KZN and the Western Cape, these struggles can no longer be dismissed by commentators as just “service delivery protests” or “pop-corn” struggles.

This is a movement – a rebellion of the poor. A movement of the unemployed, of shackdwellers and of small towns, all across the country. The striking platinum workers of 2014 who stood up against the whole gamut of mine bosses, the state and the strike-breaking unions have 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 working class community struggles of the last 10 to 15 years are notable for some common features: they have been localised, they have been largely borne by the unemployed, the youth and by women; they have been led by activists who had no connection with past anti-apartheid movement struggles, and they have not forged their own unifying political identify, let alone organisation.

Instead, others have attempted to establish this for them by filling the leadership vacuum.

Between 1994 and 2002, the old Left within the Congress milieu largely ignored these struggles or dismissed them as opportunist or 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.

Later, two sections of the old Left stepped in. From the side of the Left in the Congress Alliance, resolutions started being passed that COSATU and/or the SA Communist Party branches should “provide leadership” – which they hardly were able to do given their social distance from these struggles. Given this distance, the space was then 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, and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Landless People’s Movement (LPM) .

The two global meeting places in SA – the World Conference on Racism (WCCR) in 2001 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) 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 – 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. By November 2010, 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.

In other spheres, we have had strikes by casual postal workers paralysing the Post Office in 2014, forming their own committees and breaking from CWU. In fact, the number of wild cat strikes by home-based carers, car guards and casual workers across all sectors has pushed up strike statistics to 2006 levels despite COSATU unions not being involved.

So what is the future of the labour movement in South Africa?

The questions of whether COSATU will split or not or whether a new federation will form or not and of whom it might be composed are secondary questions in the larger landscape of working class struggles and social justice.

In many ways, trade unions in the form we came to know them in South Africa, as elsewhere in the world, were outcomes not launch-pads.

If we are to see a new labour movement emerge as a revolutionary force in the spirit of May Day then we are going to have to prioritise the new working class of precariousness and to seek to unite the wave of community struggles with the new forms of self-organisation emerging out of so-called ‘spontaneous” and “unprocedural” strikes.

A new labour movement will have to be part of a new broader social movement and seek to discover new forms of collective bargaining that may or may not even be trade unions in the sense that we have known before. A new labour movement will have to think beyond the current labour framework.

The working class is today very different from 30 years ago when COSATU was launched. Now we have a class of casualised, informalised, partially-employed, unemployed, feminised and fragmented millions, often working – if at all – in outsourced companies, for labour brokers or in the informal sector. A class of semi-housed, shack dwellers and commuters; a class that has increased in social weight in society but where the full-time, industrial worker is a minority. Now we have strikes by home-based carers working for a stipend, seasonal farmworkers, car guards and waste-pickers scavenging in bins. The workplace is now equally the community, the home and the street.

A new labour movement will have to find ways of making common cause with their struggles and forms of organisation appropriate for these shock troops of the new proletariat.

Leonard Gentle is director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (Ilrig). The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. No inference should be made on whether these reflect the editorial position of GroundUp.