New South African Review 2. Paul Hoffman
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).
Soon after the April 2009 elections, following which Zuma became president, and the appointment of SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande as Higher Education minister and his deputy Jeremy Cronin as deputy minister of Transport, turbulence within the alliance increased significantly. While government dared not talk about labour market flexibility, it became clear that macroeconomic policy was not going to change, for the ANC was too beholden to the minerals-energy-financial complex and its perceived need to attract foreign investment (Mohamed, 2010).
CONTESTATION FROM WITHIN
Cosatu soon realised that there was more continuity with the past than change (Cosatu, 2010a). Indeed, there were ominous signs of creeping social conservatism under Zuma (Butler, 2010), as well as threats to the liberal constitutional order (which Cosatu, in fighting Zuma’s corner against corruption charges, assisted by casting doubt on the judicial system, and supporting the closure of the anti-corruption unit, the Scorpions (Pillay, 2007)).
Cosatu, in its September 2010 analysis of the post-Polokwane era, identified three phases of its relationship with the ruling party. First, there was the ‘honeymoon’ phase from December 2007 to mid-2009, when two ‘successful’ alliance summits were held; the alliance produced a ‘progressive’ election manifesto; and Cosatu and the SACP were ‘consulted’ on the appointment of the new cabinet and won the new post of Economic Development, to ‘coordinate economic policy’. There were, however, ‘clear signs that the old bureaucracy and leaders of the 96-class project’ continued to hold sway in both the ANC and government (Cosatu, 2010a: 20).
Second, there was the ‘fight back and contestation’ phase from mid-2009 to 2010, when, soon after the national elections which brought Zuma to power, it became clear that conservative class forces were still ascendant in the ANC, particularly around macroeconomic policy, and the ANC rejected calls for the alliance to be the political centre. Third, Cosatu identified the current ‘political paralysis’ phase, in which the ANC allegedly refused to honour all the policy commitments made at Polokwane. For our purposes, the last two phases may be merged into one.
The August–September 2010 public sector strikes stretched tensions considerably. Cosatu embarked on an extended nationwide strike that saw union members hurling insults at the president, questioning his sexual morality and his government’s perceived imperviousness to the pain of public sector workers. The strike followed the equally massive 2007 public sector strike, when Mbeki was still at the helm. The Zuma-led ANC had, in its 2009 election manifesto, promised an expanded public sector and ‘improvements in working conditions and the provision of decent wages for workers’ (Hassen, 2010: 4) but, instead, workers have seen high pay