TAKING POWER SERIOUSLY

ISSUE NO. 76 JUNE 2021

South Africa’s new progressive magazine standing for social justice.

1 SEPTEMBER 2020Amandla! Issue No.71Towards a general strike: interview with Zwelinzima Vavi / Can we reclaim football from below? / Saving the public sector

‘A remarkable book - Ngwane’s great achievement is he once more rescues the amakomiti from academic condescension and historical obliteration. Here, he says, is a vision of another world made, run, and governed by working people. Amakomiti is a book everyone should read’ - Leo Zelig, author of An Ounce of Practice (Hoperoad, 2017)

‘One of the most exciting and provocative books that I’ve read in a long time, Amakomiti challenges the stereotype of shanty-dwellers as a powerless underclass without social power. Ngwane unveils instead a defiant working-class world with rich traditions of resistance and a genius for self-organization’ - Mike Davis, author of Planet of the Slums (Verso, 2007)

AMAKOMITIGrassroots Democracy in South African Shack Settlements

Trevor Ngwane is a scholar activist who spent twenty years as a full-time organiser in South African trade unions, community organisations and social movements before and after the defeat of apartheid. He later obtained his PhD in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg where he now teaches and conducts research.

an people who live in shantytowns, shacks and favelas teach us anything about democracy? About how to govern society in a way that is

inclusive, participatory and addresses popular needs? This book argues that they can.In a study conducted in dozens of South Africa’s shack settlements, where more than 9 million people live, Trevor Ngwane finds thriving shack dwellers’ committees that govern local life, are responsive to popular needs and provide a voice for the community. These committees, called ‘amakomiti’ in

the Zulu language, organise the provision of basic services such as water, sanitation, public works and crime prevention especially during settlement establishment.

Amakomiti argues that, contrary to common perception, slum dwellers are in fact an essential part of the urban population, whose political agency must be recognised and respected. In a world searching for democratic alternatives that serve the many and not the few, it is to the shantytowns, rather than the seats of political power, that we should turn.

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Editorial

News Briefs

Feature: the state of the workers’ movement

Climate crisis

What do we mean by?

Analysis

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Corruption is a class project

News Briefs

A turning point in the Palestinian struggle

Precarious workers continue to search for organisation

Towards a general strike

Amazon wages war against unions

EFF organises and represents workers

Unions in crisis: has the union form outlived its usefulness for workers?

Weakening of unions anderosion of worker control

Demystifying nuclear energy: do we need it to save ourselves?

Policing the colony: a police abolition primer for this land

Against nuclear vanities

Green colonialism

What do we mean by a federation?

International

New politics

Culture

Book review

The EFF will not bring the change South Africans need

Saving the public sector is critical for a just recovery

A turning point in the Palestinian struggleMozambique: the gas dream becomes a nightmare

Mass-rooted Left renewal as the foundation

Can we reclaim football from below?

The economy on your doorstep

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36 Mozambique: the gas dream becomes a nightmare

15 Amazon wages war against unions

28 Policing the colony: a police abolition primer for this land

We welcome feedback

HE SCANDAL SURROUNDING the Health Minister is symptomatic of a terrible disease gripping

South Africa. Literally, billions of rands are looted, not just by the predatory elite (a small collection of wannabe capitalists), but also by the “civilised” Sandton elites. Their combined efforts are laying waste to the economy.

The crisisCovid-19 has laid bare the depth of the social, economic and political crises facing South Africa. No country or state can sustain a society where almost 50% of the work force is unemployed. Nor is it possible to talk of a united single nation where just 10% of the super-rich own 90% of the wealth. And no society can develop where a woman is raped on average every 25 seconds.

Billions of rands are lost to looting, price gouging and profit shifting. This is money that the state should be investing in social renewal, creating decent work and reindustrialising the economy for a low carbon future. For example,

● Global Financial Integrity estimated South Africa lost just over $26 bn through trade misinvoicing, transfer pricing, profit shifting and other forms of illicit financial outflows;

● According to Kenneth Brown (SA’s former Chief Procurement Officer) in his 2016 report, 40 percent of the government’s budget for goods and services was being consumed by inflated prices from suppliers, and fraud;

● Davis Tax Commission conservatively estimated that SA loses at least R50 bn to corporate profit shifting annually;

● Pravin Gordhan estimated that “state capture” between 2014 -2017 cost R250 bn.

Corruption and cronyism dominate the discussion of SA’s current political situation. So we need to understand their roots. They are the symptoms of the crisis of the project to create a black capitalist class without redistributing wealth - assets - capital.

The reality of state captureA predatory elite has increasingly taken control of the ANC and used it as a platform to influence state tender and

procurement processes. This has been done from within the state at all levels, including state-owned enterprises. Hence the term “state capture”. This illustrates the linkages between capital and the state.

But instead of that being made clear, we get a story that it’s all about a bad faction of the ANC.

It is not something exclusive to Zuptas. It stretches from CEOs of state-owned corporations, to Director Generals, Chiefs, Headmen, ward councillors, and even trade union officials. All desperate to accumulate, in order to escape their Apartheid-defined circumstances.

A key focus for all components of the aspirant black capitalist class is the state procurement budget, worth +/- R900 bn per year. It is on this procurement budget, and in particular the budgets of state-owned enterprises, that the organised network of predatory capital honed in. And with Broederbond precision, they placed their people to facilitate access to the contracting process.

Civil war in the capitalist classEven within the new black capitalist elite there are divisions. There are sections more dependent on the state for accumulation, and other sections more dependent on transnational

capital. Hence the political differences between a Jimmy Manyi, on the one hand, and a Sipho Pityana or Cyril Ramaphosa, on the other.

Ramaphosa’s clean-up campaign against corruption, is convenient. It deals with his political opponents in the ANC. But it is riddled with contradictions. Some of his closest allies are deeply embroiled in corruption scandals. David Mabuza, his Deputy President, his close ally in the Eastern Cape Oscar Mabuyane and of course, Gwede Mantashe, Pule Mabe and now Zweli Mkhize.

The roots of this crisis lie in the failure of the state and the ruling elites to renew a strategy for accumulating wealth that was capable of sustained economic growth and rates of profit for capital. Instead, the post-Apartheid government attempted to reproduce the accumulation model of the Minerals-Energy Complex. At the same time it tried to engineer greater black ownership of the economy.

It has been a dismal failure. And it is the source of a class conflict inside the capitalist class. On the one hand there is an emerging black capitalist group hungry to secure ownership of the

Corruption is a class project

The post-Apartheid government attempted to reproduce the accumulation model of the Minerals-Energy Complex. At the same time it tried to engineer greater black ownership of the economy.

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heights of the economy. On the other hand we have big business desperate to restore profitability in the face of global competition.

A dysfunctional stateThis has coincided with a neoliberal hollowing out of the state. And this hollowed out state is what the so-called “predatory elite” depend on. This has made the state even more dysfunctional as its institutions have been perverted to serve their interests.

Using the state for accumulation has consequences. Provision of water and other services is contracted out to private companies, whether they have the expertise to provide the service or not. Outsourcing and sub-contracting become a major means of delivery of services and infrastructure development. This requires over-pricing and the cutting of corners to be profitable. And worse - neglect, and even sabotage and destruction of infrastructure, become a positive as they

create opportunities for outsourcing, from which state officials can benefit.

And we are not short of examples: an estimated R57 bn needed to fix defective RDP houses. Rand Water’s accusations that water tanker contractors are sabotaging water pipes. To name but two.

So rivalries within the capitalist class, rather than between capital and labour, are most significant in shaping the current political situation.

The consequences of this are not hard to see. Clover has announced recently that it is closing down the country’s largest cheese factory in Lichtenburg, North West, blaming water and power outages. The company also struggled to use the road leading to the factory due to large potholes.

Likewise, Astral Foods, SA’s largest poultry company, JSE listed, with a market capitalisation of R6.6 bn. Astral was forced to take government to court to try to get a reliable supply of electricity and water to its Standerton operation. As the CEO of Sibanye Stillwater, Neil Froneman, complains: “It’s one of the reasons why foreign companies don’t want to come here, because they can see they’ll have to do what the government is supposed to do but isn’t doing. They’ll end up tarnished with social issues that they haven’t caused.”

Opportunities for accumulationThis dysfunctionality is not a random outcome of looting. It is intentional. For big business it justifies liberalisation and privatisation; for the predatory elite it provides opportunities for accumulation.

Eskom is a case in point. On the one hand, its crisis is justifying the creation of a private electricity sector, worth billions of rands, through the Renewable

Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Programme. And then, as the crisis deepens, the opportunities for private accumulation multiply. Look at the R218 bn for Karpowership. A 20-year deal to supply 1,220 megawatts of electricity from gas-burning power plants stationed on ships moored offshore. And of course there is the plundering of Eskom’s massive procurement budget, whether for Kusile and Medupi or to supply coal.

The same process is unfolding at Transnet and Prasa where billions were looted. And it has given rise to government’s plan to privatise part of the rail system and ports.

So where do we go from here?As the fight between different sections of the ruling class intensifies, it is crucial to avoid false dichotomies: Ramaphosa good; Magashule bad. Neither faction of the ANC are friends of the workers and the poor. And as Ramaphosa gains the upper hand, leading to prosecutions against erstwhile comrades, this should not be seen as a renewal of the ANC.

Different factions of the ANC are differently implicated in looting and profiting through their political connections and proximity to the state. And all factions agree on austerity and some version of neoliberalism as appropriate economic and social policy. The workers and popular movement should take an attitude of a plague on both their houses.

It is imperative not to repeat the mistakes of Cosatu and the SACP, which chose Zuma against Mbeki. The politics of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” is mistaken. It leads to disasters such as

the 2008 Polokwane conference of the ANC.

The Alliance is dead as a progressive block. In spite of the challenges of rebuilding the mass movement on principles of working class independence, it is the only way for the workers and popular movement to recapture its relevance and renew itself. This will entail struggle on multiple fronts, not least corruption and state dysfunctionality.

The provision of decent social services, especially at local government level, is at the centre of the struggle against corruption, cronyism and state capture. And in this struggle, demands for in-sourcing and against privatisation will be important to unite workers in the labour movement with their sisters and brothers in working class communities.

The struggle against austerity, against wage cuts and retrenchments in the public sector, and the struggle against corruption are intimately linked. They provide the bridge for building the necessary worker / community alliance. To fight effectively against corruption, we have to join the struggle against austerity and neoliberalism.

As the crisis deepens, the opportunities for private accumulation multiply. Look at the R218 bn for Karpowership

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NUM follows NUMSAWhat goes around, comes aroundIn 2013, Numsa held its Special National Congress. The resolution that got the most attention was to stop support for the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance. But the congress also resolved to break away from the Cosatu tradition of industrial sector unionism – one industry, one union – and start organising “along the value chain”. For metal and engineering, organising along the value chain meant, amongst other industries, organising in the mining industry – the beginning of the value chain. As a result, Numsa now has thousands of members in the sector.

Well, it has taken NUM eight years to catch up but now they have had a Special Congress of their own and resolved to do exactly the same. The language is also the same, “The steel sector is the core element in the metal industry value chain…we can look at the mining of iron ore as one value chain contributor to the steel manufacturing process”. Limusa, the unsuccessful union set up by the late former President of Numsa, Cedric Gina, will be absorbed. And from now on Numsa can expect competition for its members in the engineering sector, the auto and tyre and rubber manufacturing sectors and the motor sector of component manufacture, petrol stations and small garages.

Whatever the result of this new competition, it represents yet another chapter in the history of South African trade unions – chasing each other’s members while over 70% of South African workers belong to no union at all.

Rands or percents?A court case about the 2015 Gold Sector agreement is at last in the Labour Court. Amcu is arguing that the 2015 agreement increased the wage gap between the mass of ordinary workers in the gold mines and higher paid groups. By law, companies must work to close the apartheid wage gap. The Labour Court is being asked to award each ordinary mine worker R50,000.Expert witness for Amcu, leftist economist Dick Forslund, has demonstrated that since 2015 inequality has increased in rands. Professor Haroon Bhorat from UCT, for the Minerals Council, says it hasn’t: “Not if you count in percent”.

So which is it that workers receive in their pay packets – rands or percents?

Sanral forced to the table by Crisis Committee On Monday 6th June, yet another drama in the battle about the N2 Wild Coast Toll Road played itself out in Sigidi village on the Amadiba coast. The Mayor of Mbizana municipality (today called Winnie Madikizela-Mandela municipality) came together with Chief Lunga Baleni and project leaders of state road building company Sanral. In the delegation was also the MEC for Public Works in Eastern Cape, Mr Babalo Madikizela.

The visitors came to get an “access agreement” for Sanral to build their 80m wide and fenced 120km/h highway through the village.

300 villagers blocked the car convoy 1 km from the Sigidi school. The dignitaries were told that the 120 learners were in session. There would be no meeting there. The school was built by the community. The Department of Education now threatens to close it.

To break the stalemate, MEC Madikizela walked into the crowd and caucused with Amadiba Crisis Committee leaders. He was allowed to speak after Amadiba Crisis Committee’s (ACC) Nonhle Mbuthuma first reminded the dignitaries of all the disrespect, deceit, intimidations and incitement of violence coming from Sanral and the mining lobby during the N2 saga.

MEC Madikizela then shocked Sanral. He opened the N2 negotiations again.

It was on 23rd January 2020 that an imbizo for the whole of Amadiba decided that Sanral must be engaged to move the N2 at least 10km from the coast. After two meetings with Sanral, the chief went behind the backs of his committee and reached an agreement with Sanral in secret talks.

The MEC gave a public assurance that this time there will be a community

delegation negotiating with Sanral, the province and the municipality. The province will wait for ACC to inform them when the community delegates have been chosen, and the time and place.

This is a substantial victory. Finally to be included in a negotiation process. And it’s a tribute to the strength of the community and its organisation to have held out so long and against such pressure and violence.

Austerity killsIt has been reported that Ethekwini TVET student, Yonwaba Manyanya, died of starvation after spending three days and nights outside. NSFAS was very quick to disclaim responsibility for Yonwaba’s death on the remarkable pretext that it wasn’t funding her. So, they congratulated themselves, she didn’t die as a result of any delay in payment.

news briefs

Visitors came to get an “access agreement” for Sanral to build their 80m wide and fenced 120km/h highway through the village. 300 villagers blocked the car convoy.

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No, NSFAS. She died as a result of no payment at all. Maybe that failure to pay her and many thousands of others might have something to do with the R6.8 billion cut in the NSFAS budget. Maybe without that cut Yonwaba would still be alive.

Billionaires: tax and charityA lot of noise is made about the generosity of billionaires who give away millions in charity. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is often cited as an example. Very rarely do we hear anyone asking how they managed to accumulate such huge wealth in the first place. And of course their wealth increases massively as a result of avoiding tax.

Now a report by a non-profit journalism organisation has put numbers on this. The 25 wealthiest Americans earned $1.1 trillion in 2018. That’s the

same amount as 14.3 million “Ordinary” Americans. But there’s a difference. The ordinary Americans paid $143 billion tax on their income. The 25 billionaires paid $1.9 billion on theirs. So those ordinary Americans paid 76 times more tax than the billionaires. In fact in 2007, the richest of them all, Jeff Bezos, paid no federal tax at all. Yet in that year Amazon doubled in value.

So the billionaires have all that money because they don’t pay tax. If they did, we wouldn’t need the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The state would have that money. It would be public money. So really, these “generous” foundations actually represent the privatisation of tax income. In the process, they allow individuals to decide what to spend that money on, rather than a democratically elected government. However flawed that democracy might be, it is no solution to allow billionaires to decide what social, medical and

educational services we get, according to what they feel like.

Solidarity with Palestinian struggle from Durban dockworkers

During the Israeli state’s ruthless bombardment of defenceless civilians in Gaza, the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) issued a call to workers and trade unions to “refuse to unload [Israeli] ships and goods from sea and airports”. The call was met with action by SATAWU members in Durban. The Zim Shanghai, owned by Israeli state-owned company Zim Lines, docked on 19th May. SATAWU workers refused to unload it.

Dockworkers took similar actions in the port of Oakland in the US and in the Italian City of Livorno. The union

in Livorno said the cargo “contained weapons and explosives that will serve to kill the Palestinian population…The port of Livorno will not be an accomplice in the massacre of the Palestinian people.”

Whilst the global labour movement has suffered during the pandemic, it has not lost its determination to act in solidarity with oppressed and brutalised people.

Solidarity against Saudia Arabia and its intervention in YemenThe following is part of a report from the Canadian Left magazine, The Bullet: “On March 26, members of anti-war organizations World BEYOND War, LabourAgainst the Arms Trade, and People for Peace London blocked railway tracksnear General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada, a London Ontario-based company

manufacturing light armoured vehicles for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The activists are calling on General Dynamics to end its complicity in the brutal Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen and calling on theCanadian government to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia and expand humanitarian assistance for the people of Yemen.

This marks the sixth anniversary of the Saudi-led, Western-backed coalition’s intervention in Yemen’s civil war, leading to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

It is estimated that 24 million Yemenis need humanitarian assistance –some 80% of the population – which is being thwarted by the Saudi-ledcoalition’s land, air, and naval blockade of the country. Since 2015, this blockade has prevented food, fuel, commercial goods and aid fromentering Yemen. According to the

World Food Program, nearly 50,000 people in Yemen are already living in famine-like conditions with 5 million just a step away. To add to the already dire situation, Yemen has one of the worst Covid-19 death rates in the world, killing 1 in 4 people who test positive…

… What our community needs is government funding for rapid conversion from military exports back to production for human needs, as these plants used to do,” says David Heap of People for Peace London. “We call for immediate public investment in much-needed green transport industries that will ensure good jobs for Londoners while protecting peace and human rights in the world.”

The Zim Shanghai, owned by Israeli state-owned company Zim Lines, docked on 19th May. Satawu workers refused to unload it.

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Precarious workers continue to search for organisationInterview with Sydney Moshoaliba, Education Officer of Casual Workers Advice Office

Please start by telling us a little bit about CWAO, just broadly speaking, what work you do.

CASUAL WORKERSAdvice Office was mainly formed to assist and organise precarious workers. By precarious workers we are talking about labour broker workers, casual workers and part-time workers. To some extent we do assist domestic workers.

So why do workers come to you when there are trade unions for all the industries around Ekurhuleni where you are based? Why aren’t they going to trade unions to get this kind of support?

WELL, YOU SEE WHEN WE STARTED this project, it was during the time when trade unions have totally declared that labour broker workers, casual workers and part-time workers are an administrative burden. So to organise them was becoming an unmanageable exercise in union organisation. And that’s when we intervened in the formation of the CWAO.

Are you saying that trade unions actually chased those workers away?

TRADE UNIONS TOTALLY REJECTED those workers on the basis that they are an extra administrative burden. At that time, around 2010 and 2011, the labour broking industry was growing massively and growing even into the state-owned enterprises, where lots of services that were provided were being outsourced. So quite clearly there was a need at that time, a greater need to organise these workers. We created space, we created a platform for them to be able to organise and challenge employers for their issues. We created a platform for workers to explore self-organising initiatives.

Unions only organise permanent workers. I can make you an example. In 2015 we embarked on a campaign called section 198 where we demanded that labour broker workers become permanent workers of the client. And in many workplaces, we were able to achieve that goal where labour broker workers were made permanent. But even though they were deemed permanent, they were still treated as second class citizens in those different workplaces.

As a result, these workers felt that because now they are deemed permanent, they can now join those unions in those different workplaces. And they then joined

those unions, different unions in different workplaces, different sectors. They joined.

But still even after they joined those unions, the issues they were raising, which are mainly the issues of equalisation in terms of conditions and wages, have still not been resolved. Three years down the line, those workers have come back to CWAO to say, “look we tried joining unions with a view that the unions would be able to assist us, and we are still where we were three years ago when we were deemed permanent”.

This is an experience that we encounter from time to time as the CWAO. As a result, these workers in turn are saying we must in collaboration form our own type of union that will be able to aggressively address these issues that we are facing in the workplaces. The birth of Simunye Workers Forum was the result.

The Simunye Workers Forum was formed in June 2016. In fact these workers came to CWAO already organised because they came from different workplaces. And when they came to CWAO they put themselves into a workers’ forum which remains the Simunye Workers Forum. There has been a forum since 2011, but the Simunye Workers Forum as such was formed in 2016.

“Trade unions have totally declared that labour broker workers, casual workers and part-time workers are an administrative burden… And that’s when we intervened in the formation of the CWAO.”

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FEATURE

the state of the workers’ movementFEATURE

the state of the workers’ movement

Are you saying that you are now forming a union, or that you have formed a union?

WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF REGISTERINGSimunye Workers Forum as a trade union. But Simunye Workers Forum, as a forum itself, is a trade union. Since its formation, the issue of registration has never been priority for the members of Simunye until such time that they realised that the employers are using this as an advantage to attack them whenever they try to address and challenge employers. So this issue of registration is not necessarily that we are now captured by the formation of the union. it’s simply to say that these workers think it would be important to register so that they can be able to advance their struggles in the workplaces.

These workers are registering Simunye as a trade union because the employers are refusing to engage with them when they raise conditions or issues or improvement of wages and conditions. They say “this Simunye is not recognised” so they cannot engage with these workers.

But we are able to represent these workers at the CCMA, bargaining council, labour court, that is not an issue.

Speaking of the CCMA, I know you are involved in a campaign to restore the services that have been cut by the budget cuts. Could you tell us what’s been happening with this campaign.

WE DO HAVE A CAMPAIGN. THE OPENCCMA Campaign is a collaboration of civil society organisation with an interest to advocate worker rights and workplace democratisation. You see the other thing that is happening here at CWAO, we also assist individual workers that maybe want to refer unfair dismissal cases, unpaid severances, unfair labour practice and so on, but we know that there are also numbers of workers who are also going directly to CCMA offices and reserving such cases.

But what we’ve realised is that the CCMA has declared that they will no longer be dealing with what we call walk-in referrals. Now those workers who normally go to the CCMA for those particular cases have been left in the cold. No-one is attending to them. When they get to the CCMA they are told to go to the internet café, get a referral, go find people to fill in the referral and so on. And these people are charging these workers.

Now it creates a problem because most of these workers who go there to refer cases are dismissed. They do not have money to buy referrals, to scan, to e-mail and so on and so on. So it means that the CCMA, by these budget cuts, is attacking the poor and the working class. That’s one of the main problems.

The second problem we are encountering is the time it takes for the CCMA to issue a set down is now taking longer because there is a limited number of commissioners who are dealing with the cases.

From what I hear you saying it means that effectively the CCMA has stopped doing the job that it was set up to do if it is not accepting workers to walk in. And yet the CCMA has trade unions on its board. What are they doing to sort out this situation?

WE ARE WELL AWARE IN THE BOARD OF CCMA you have Cosatu representation, Fedusa representation and what they were

saying in those board meetings was that workers must go online to refer cases. So basically, that is a selling out, it’s a sell-out position. You have an organisation that is supposed to be representing the interests of the working class. They know the working class are poor workers who have an issue of the data, the resources. And they say they must go online.

And the campaign to open up the CCMA again, is that in motion?

THE CAMPAIGN IS IN MOTION AND THE campaign will not stop until such time that the CCMA agrees to open its doors and allow walk-in referrals. So we basically are putting pressure in areas where we have formations and structures that exist. We know that in Western Cape comrades are busy from time to time. They go and picket outside the CCMA. And we also here in Joburg from time to time are going to the CCMA offices and picket and protest there. So the campaign is on and it’s ongoing and it’s gaining momentum as we move along.

“The Open CCMA campaign is in motion and the campaign will not stop until such time that the CCMA agrees to open its doors and allow walk-in referrals.”

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FEATURE

the state of the workers’ movementFEATURE

the state of the workers’ movement

One way to assess the state of the trade union movement is to look at the proportion of workers who are union members. And it seems we are now down to 23 per cent, compared with 45% in 1997. Saftu has always said, and you have always said, even from before Saftu, that its purpose is to go out there and organise the unorganised. How is it going?

NOT YET ANYWHEREclose to where I would like to see it being. We have a great plan from the Congress and always the problem is execution. The biggest stumbling block to execution of that plan is that all of our unions are start-up and they are fishing in the same pond as the bigger unions. So you’ve got many manufacturing unions, and quite a number of service and public sector unions. Coordination of recruitment from that perspective is exceedingly difficult.

We’re thinking now very, very hard about how we can perhaps develop the idea we raised in the Congress, the idea of “bridge” unions. Bridge unions means that unions accept to focus on a particular area. Even if you are a general union, you can accept to organise in a particular geographical area. So that doesn’t lead you

into competition with another union. And where there is already an established union, you must allow that union to continue recruiting and to work in that area.

Only when we have that strategy coordinated properly, can we begin to make progress in terms of our recruitment strategy. But for now, we tried in the public sector. There were tensions immediately. We have not even tried in the private sector because the problem of overlapping scope is much more pronounced there.

What is it that is interrupting it, what is stopping unions merging? There are lots of precedents; Cosatu was formed out of mergers; Numsa was created out of mergers with a number of unions. What is the obstacle to these mergers taking place?

THE OLD PROBLEMS. YOU KNOW THEold problems where leadership think that their logo and their colours and their positions are more important than unity. They don’t pronounce that. You just see a dragging of the foot to realise that, no, we still have much more work to do at a political level for the leadership to embrace unity as the principle, instead of regarding their current positions as the principle.

So Saftu is now 4 years old, what has happened to Saftu’s membership numbers between 2017 and now, 2021?

THEY INCREASED, YOU REMEMBER WElaunched a federation of 600 000 it went up 70,000, way below our target. We wanted to hit a million in the second year of our launch. We’re not anywhere close to that. And it’s stagnant.

If you look at that stagnant situation, one of the things we hear about is workers who are terribly disappointed with the service they get from their unions. So one of the reasons for the failure of unions to grow is that they can’t provide the service that members want and so they leave. Is that also your impression and how do we remedy this situation?

SAFTU HAS TO DO WHAT IT SAID IT was going to do. If Saftu is no different from the rest of other unions it won’t attract members, full stop. Our battle, and the battle as we go to the Congress of Saftu, is to implement the service charter that we have adopted at a federation level; to help train the leaders of the unions, train their organisers and develop manuals to help

“Without the general strike we can’t achieve our strategic programmes… If we strike one by one, we will be defeated… But if you can pull everything together, it won’t be 2 weeks before the government is forced to come with their real discussion.”

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 8

FEATURE

the state of the workers’ movementFEATURE

the state of the workers’ movement

unions train their own shop stewards. We had no capacity all along, but now we have just employed about two months ago a person to do that.

The major problem we face is that shop steward training has died, even amongst the big unions. Once you don’t train the shop steward, the union dies. You don’t need sharp organisers, you need sharp shop stewards.

Another challenge that you’ve raised quite continuously is the issue of social distance, the fact that leadership and membership of unions inhabit different universes and this leads to mistrust. How can that be solved?

POLITICAL TRAINING, DEEPER ideological grounding of the leadership. Look, the gap now is no longer between General Secretary and the rest of the membership. Even amongst the shop stewards, between the shop stewards, there is a gap between the full-time shop stewards and the ordinary shop stewards. The full-timers are more likely to never go back to work. They are full-time officials of the union; they have cars, they have smart phones, they have i-pads and sometimes they even have laptops. They have offices, air-conditioned, and they treasure never ever going back to work. I was told a story of a shop steward who lost his position of a shop steward, who just collapsed in the morning in the bathroom whilst having a shower. That’s how serious this matter has become.

As Marx once said, it is the material conditions that determine your levels of consciousness.

But if your material conditions determine your level of consciousness, that seems to me not to be compatible with an approach which says we will change consciousness by political education. Don’t you have to change material conditions as well?

WE HAVE TO. WE HAVE TO CHANGE the material conditions. We can’t be chasing, as general secretaries, the same pay as the director generals or ministers or even the CEOs of private companies. If we continuously improve the size of the car, of the cellphone, of the latest laptop,

and then the massive housing and benefits and all of that, that gap increases in reality. Before you know it, the level of anger in the leadership is not the same as that of members who are queuing up in the public transport in Joburg.

And then the person receiving that big package, that big car and the rest of it, really, really wants to hold on to it, they really want to keep it, they will do almost anything to avoid losing it.

YOU SAID IT. INCLUDING BEING prepared to commit murder in order to retain their position. The issue now becomes so personal because there is so much at stake if you lose it. You just look at your kids. You have to look at your kids.

What about the old maxim of the labour movement - anybody who works for the labour movement gets paid the average skilled wage and no more than that.

THAT IS WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE Saftu constitution. The constitution says you will not be paid above your skill, your comparable skill level in society. The question is, is the GS of Saftu paid above the comparable skill level in society? I don’t think so; I don’t know.

Another of the ingredients of this crisis is the investment companies and all that has gone on around them. We know in many, many cases that they are the cause of terrible trouble, either by people openly looting them or by

these companies using the structures of the union as its salesforce of financial services products. How do we deal with all of this?

LET ME TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED the other day to me. Workers who are members of Ceppwawu, the Cosatu union, came to my office last year. And they told me the tales of how they were battling for the food parcels which ended before they could even reach them They were suffering. And they asked me a question, “GS we know that Ceppwawu invested in the pharmaceutical company and the last time we checked the union had R6bn; are we not entitled to that R6bn as former members who were there when this thing was taken on our behalf?”

Jesus. And they’re then saying, “should these things not be orientated around a worker, a worker in retirement no longer having an income, a worker who got dismissed at work even if he’s still searching for employment, a worker

unemployed wanting a job and therefore looking at the direction of the investment company?”

That made me to think. We discussed with them for hours, to say perhaps the union must rethink the whole thing as to who benefits from them essentially, outside the CEOs and the top leadership getting some goodies. How does a worker, who was a member, who is now no longer a member, benefit from this thing?

And I know that some unions, such as Sactwu for example, have done a great job in terms of resuscitating factories that would have collapsed and therefore getting workers that would have lost their jobs to continue being employed. Is that a model we should

follow? Really be serious about taking over collapsed factories and run them as cooperatives, not for profit, but to sustain workers? Or ideologically is this thing completely not compatible with the whole idea of a trade union?

In the beginning when Saftu was formed, relations with other federations, particularly Cosatu, were very frosty. Has that moderated over the last four years? What are relations like now, particularly with Cosatu?

“Cosatu is weak even though it has most of the public sector workers. The reason why government saw it fit and safe to just impose a wage freeze and to walk out of a signed agreement is because they knew they would face no consequences.”

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SORT OF IMPROVED, TO THE POINT that last year when Cosatu called a strike, the NEC of Saftu said, “let’s join the strike and raise our own issues”. But the symbolism that was registered on 7th October last year was massive. And that was carried on 24th February when Saftu called the strike. Even though Cosatu didn’t practically join, but we found ourselves singing the same tune against austerity. And as a result Cosatu issued a formal statement to support Saftu strike.

What I had hoped is that we will by now have met Cosatu leadership and have a coordinating centre, even if it means moving towards a confederation of some kind. And a confederation will agree on the minimum programmes: let’s fight austerity, let’s coordinate better the public sector strikes. And I’ve made a call for the

public sector to coordinate with the private sector and embark on a single strike, one day across all of the sectors of the economy.

And let’s face it, Cosatu is weak even though it has most of the public sector workers. The reason why government saw it fit and safe to just impose a wage freeze and to walk out of a signed agreement is because they knew they would face no consequences. And yet if we were to coordinate properly, not just the federation, but bring all of the 200 plus independent unions, I think workers will begin to have hope again that unions are about them and not about the leadership and the logos.

I suppose some people would say it’s interesting to talk about the unity between Saftu and other federations but you’ve also got a problem at home, of unity within Saftu. There are significant reports of conflict in

the leading structures of Saftu. What happened to the unity that Saftu is supposed to represent?

ALL FEDERATIONS ARE CONTESTED. We are a contested terrain. And we are a new brand, and political formations are contesting that brand and that creates tensions. What I hate about these tensions is that Saftu has no tensions about whether we should fight against the LRA amendments or not. It’s all about the political policy, whether we support or do not support, or whether one is accused of being closer or not closer to that political formation. It’s all about politics. The elephant in the room is the politics. And even Cosatu was split by the politics and not by the campaign against or for basic income grant for example. And that’s very sad.

It seems a bit ironic. In 2014, when Numsa was expelled from Cosatu, the issue that caused that expulsion was the relationship with the ANC and Numsa’s call for Cosatu to sever that relationship. My impression was that one of the founding ideas of the new federation was that we wouldn’t have that contest again. We wouldn’t ask the federation to support a particular political organisation because to do so is divisive; individual unions could support particular formations but why should the federation do so? Why is it that we seem to have fallen into exactly the same trap again?

THE POLITICS IS JUICY, VERY, VERY sweet. Because the politics speaks to the individuals’ careers beyond the trade union. For example, here is what I think has created a tension in Saftu.

When Saftu was formed in 2017, there was no SRWP. Saftu makes a call for a debate on the creation of a mass workers’

party. Immediately there are tensions between what Saftu congress decided and the process that is unfolding in Numsa that crystallises with the creation of the SRWP later, when it was formed in 2018. And so the delay in the formation of the SRWP, the emergence of Saftu and the failure to coordinate these two aspirations, from Saftu Congress and the Numsa congress, has created all of the tensions that you are seeing.

The fight now is either to get Saftu to endorse SRWP or to allow it to implement the decisions of its congress and the working class summit it convened.

If we turn to the more material battles, there is a huge confrontation that’s looming in the public sector. And it increasingly looks like there can’t be

any room for compromise between the 0 per cent, if you can call it an offer, of the state, and the 7 per cent demand of the unions. It feels like this battle is going to be crucial in setting the tone of the balance of forces and political engagement maybe for years to come. So how do we win this battle?

IN MY VIEW, THE ONLY WAY WE CANwin that battle is when we do not fight it in isolation. And that’s my call. And I hope that this call will be endorsed by the NEC. The only way to win that battle is when we coordinate the public sector as a whole, meaning the PSCBC, the local government, the parastatals, all of them. And we coordinate the disputes. And we coordinate those disputes with the rest of the private sector.

Already a number of private sector employers are refusing to even talk about wages. And in fact if you look at private security, the employers have bolted out of the agreement and they are saying, “No your government has led the way, so we are not coming to implement or even in the next round of negotiations, to talk to you about the wages”. So that’s where we are and we ought to be coordinating that effectively. And we are not.

“What I hate is that Saftu has no tensions about whether we should fight against the LRA amendments or not. It’s all about the political policy, whether we support or do not support, or whether one is accused of being closer or not closer to that political formation. It’s all about politics.”

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Am I right in interpreting that as a call to build a general strike?

EXACTLY. WITHOUT THE GENERALstrike we can’t achieve our strategic programmes. Forget it. Let’s face it, even a Saftu-coordinated general strike, even if the other federations can join, 1, 2, 3 days it will make no real mark.

What can change the whole scenario is a protracted strike over wages. But in that strike we don’t just talk wages. We say “Fix our public hospitals, introduce the NHI now, we are tired, we are working there, we have no infrastructure, get the infrastructure, employ, fill the vacancies.” You make the same demands in education, “Fill the vacancies, get us laboratories, libraries, employ security, fence our schools, get rid of latrine toilets.” And you do the same in every police station, “Fix our police stations, renew the infrastructure get more vans and ensure there is more training for the police officials.” Same in correctional services, “We can’t cope with these current levels of overcrowding, we need correctional centres to be correctional centres and not a breeding ground for training of criminals.”

And we make the same demands centred around the overall economy, “Nationalise the mineral wealth but put it under the democratic control of workers. Take us out of the quagmire of the current levels of carbon-based economy, put us into the just transition, but place that ownership under the communities and under the workers.”

You make those fundamental transitional demands. But you then go into a protracted strike around them. I think that if we can do that, we will force the government to increase corporate taxes and introduce something about the illicit cash outflows. It will stop the bleeding of this procurement budget which is currently losing 35 to 40 per cent, and it will address corruption. And we will see a real reconstruction of society again.

And we can say, “fine we may not be ready to pull such an action in 2021 with this corona virus. So we need to maybe see what goes beyond August/September and begin to coordinate for such an action next year, with every worker knowing, that fine they can impose a wage freeze for now but we are coming next year. It’s not just going to be about the 7 per cent. It’s going to be about reconstructing this society totally.”

A protracted general strike would be completely unprecedented in this country.

THE LEVELS OF ATTACK ON WORKERSare unprecedented. If you don’t do that type of a strike, we are finished. We are going to be on our backs throughout. And unemployment which is at 42 per cent will go to 50 per cent. Already the Eastern Cape is 52 per cent; already it’s 47 per cent for women. Already.

If we strike one by one, we will be defeated. The current conditions are putting so much pressure on each worker family that they can hardly afford a protracted strike that will go 6, 8, 10 weeks. But if you can pull everything together, it won’t be 2 weeks before the government is forced to come with their real discussion. And the discussion must be, “Fix the economy, fix the economy, this growth path is going to reproduce this poverty, unemployment, and inequalities, fix that”.

“The only way to win that battle is when we coordinate the public sector as a whole, meaning the PSCBC, the local government, the parastatals, all of them. And we coordinate the disputes. And we coordinate those disputes with the rest of the private sector.”

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HE GENERAL FRAME: A DEEP, systemic crisis. There can be

little argument that the world of work in South Africa, and

indeed globally, is in the throes of a deep, systemic crisis.

There are record levels of socio-economic inequality between those who own the means of production and those who produce. This is threatening to pauperise the vast majority of workers and has only been further catalysed by the ongoing pandemic. Workers and worker organisations are increasingly divided, ideologically, socially, economically and organisationally. The trade union

movement is disorientated and weak. This has given rise to strategic

confusion. Past ideological certainties are no longer able to provide the framing glue for holding together a clear strategic vision and set of goals. Previously, we have had institutional and organisational moorings that allowed for the strategic building of more inclusive, militant and effective unions as well as the catalysing of working class unity in action. These have largely crumbled or been captured by corporatists, corrupt bureaucrats, abstentionists and sectarian/factional politics.

All of this raises a range of crucial questions and issues for the working class, as well as for progressive/Left forces in general. One of those questions is whether or not the union form has outlived its usefulness for workers, as a historically central component of working class organisation and struggle.

The two dominant views of unions on the Left largely derive from Lenin’s idea of “trade union consciousness”.

The one view is that only the (vanguard) political party can be a vehicle for mass political struggle and revolution. Although unions are good sources for party recruits and for some economic struggles,

they are fundamentally compromised, reformist and limited.

The other view sees unions as potential vehicles for mass struggle, but only where there is socialist leadership and involvement of a socialist party. The main problem here however, is that a great many who call themselves socialists, and more specifically layers of union leadership and officialdom who belong to “socialist” parties, have been responsible for the degeneration of unions and have themselves also been fully compromised.

Regardless of these framing views

though, it is in the realm of union life, practical action and experience of struggle that a more grounded and accurate assessment can be made about the state of unions, unionism and the associated usefulness of unions to/for workers.

Specific realitiesA crisis of worker participation and representationThere are three unfortunately enduring features of South Africa’s post-1994 union picture: • A minority of workers are union

members. The latest Stats SA figures show that, as of 2018, only 29.5% of employees are members of a trade union;

• Unions have fundamentally failed politically and organisationally to see and acknowledge casualised workers, not only as equals but as forming the majority of the working class;

• Organisational and material gaps between union leadership/officials and rank-and-file members have increased. This has been accompanied by a general lack of assistance to, and representation of, those members.

A 2018 Cosatu survey found that many union officials considered the financial and human resource “costs” of organising and recruiting casual workers were too high for the consequent “return” in union subscriptions. The membership of most existing unions overwhelmingly comprises male permanent workers. They are themselves insecure about their jobs and social status. Their general attitude to casual workers (and more especially women workers who make up a majority of casual workers) is either one of indifference or hostility and control.

A crisis of consciousnessWorkers’ social, political, economic and moral consciousness has generally been missing from the strategic radar of unions for the better part of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. Much like the party, state and social movement terrains, the personal has been largely removed as a central component in shaping and guiding both individual and collective practice.

Unions in crisis:Has the union form outlived its usefulness for workers?By Dale T McKinley

Unions have fundamentally failed politically and organisationally to see and acknowledge casualised workers, not only as equals but as forming the majority of the working class

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Large parts of the labour sector, both individual union leaders and rank-and-file workers, have contributed negatively to (re)shaping the landscape of political and socio-economic possibility, of what it means to be a progressive worker/activist, to build and engage in inclusive and tolerant organisation and struggle. Basic ethics/values of honesty, respect, humility, accountability, empathy, responsibility, solidarity and generosity informed the huge personal sacrifices for, and collective moral power of, past worker and liberation movement struggle in South Africa. With some exceptions these have been cast aside.

In their place, union investment companies have been at the heart of the preoccupation of union leaders/officials with high-end lifestyles focused on personal enrichment and accumulation. They have prioritised factional power-mongering and engaged in destructive, socially reactionary behaviour, including violence against women. As Mandy Moussouris asked soon after the formation of Saftu: “‘What exactly is the new federation going to do to ensure that women do not continue to be used as political tools in a battle of men over power?”

A crisis of organisational formThe post-1994 labour market terrain has been institutionally, legally and procedurally constructed to privilege unions as the principal form of worker representation and voice. Worker organisation has been required to formalise into the union form to get recognition by employers and participation in the institutional and legal-procedural frame. And this has cost significant financial, human and legal-institutional resources.

The union form in South Africa has been mostly characterised by exclusivity and hierarchy, which have gone hand-in-hand with formalisation. Exclusive in the sense that unions represent a shrinking minority of workers; hierarchical because all unions have embraced formal leadership positions differentiated by title and salary, centralised bodies of executive authority at the core of regular decision-

making and the general dominance of men at all levels of the organisation.

While the form of worker organisation does not completely determine its core character, the two are in many ways inter-linked. The form can go a

long way in determining how effective the organisation is in:

● practically advancing the workplace struggles of its members;

● linking up/creating solidarity with other workers and the broader working class, not just in the workplace but on a more mass, campaigning and solidarity basis;

● responding to the overall needs of those members; and

● reflecting its stated values and principles as well as aims and objectives.

With some exceptions, unions in South Africa and globally have largely proven to be ill-fitted to the overall and rapidly changing structure of the working class, the conditions of work and the needs of both union members and other workers.

Alternative forms and possibilitiesBut unions are not about to just disappear or be wholly replaced by more democratic, worker-controlled forms of organisation, even if there is a strong case to be made for such. Nonetheless, over the last 20 years the key foundation of gains for workers (both unionised and otherwise) has come from creative, mass, collective action outside of the formal/legislative labour institutional framework of Nedlac, tripartite corporatist negotiations and bargaining councils. In other words, from collectively conceptualised and independently practiced class struggle, regardless of the dominant worker organisational form

This includes non-union worker collectives such as the African Reclaimers

Organisations (ARO) who are considering adopting a model of “community membership” - middle-class supporters etc. can join as “activists” and lend their expertise and practical support. In this way, the organisational form is built to

cover the multiple and changing needs of members; for example, kitchens supplying food to workers and their families, rehabilitation centres and the occupation and self-management of empty spaces for production.

Workers in South Africa should also look at the Argentine Union de Trabajadores de la Economia Popular (UTEP - Union of Workers of the Popular

Economy). It was formed in 2011 as a confederation, bringing together worker-recovered enterprises with self-employed and casualised workers in recycling, textile and housing cooperatives. UTEP has more recently formed itself into a new type of “extended trade-union”. Crucially, UTEP’s underlying ideological frame, principles, values and social relations are at the centre of its organisational form and practice. In this way, it is able to adapt its forms of organising to the holistic needs of all members, dependants and supporters. At the same time, it has a solidaristic and movement-building focus and intent.

So, it’s possible to see the current and coming period as heralding a transition of possibility rather than decline. The present union form, as well as the labour movement as a whole, needs to be reimagined and rebuilt. It is within and alongside the world of casualised work (which houses the majority of workers) that it can and needs to be done.

Here, there is the possibility of a future in which much of the old ideological, organisational and discursive baggage can be off-loaded. New spaces for critical thinking and debate can be created, in which progressive and personal as well as collective social and moral values and principles can be committed to, and in which the basics of inclusive and grounded organisational forms and struggles can take centre stage.

Dale T. McKinley is an Education and Information officer at the International Labour, Research & Information Group (ILRIG)

What exactly is the new federation going to do to ensure that women do not continue to be used as political tools in a battle of men over power?

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Before we discuss the state of the trade union movement, we need to understand what is happening to its membership. You have been saying that the nature of the work and the nature of the workforce have been changing. The 4th Industrial Revolution.

IT IS VERY NEW. IF YOUgo into the assembly plants, they used to operate with our old guys on the line. Now there are operators who have got not only matric as it used to be the case. These operators are now called artisans/technicians. They not only operate these machines. When they break they attend

to them. Employers want people who will look after the machinery and run production at the same time.

There is a movement away from the old traditional toolmakers/mechanicians. Now what they need are people with mechatronics and other far advanced skills. An hour or 30 minutes before the shift, these people will come in to ensure that the machines are up and ready and are guaranteed to run for the next eight hours. And they run that production by themselves. And when they leave, a new crew comes in, qualified in the same way. This is not the ordinary operator as you would have in the olden days. With the 4th Industrial Revolution, the workforce is sinking, but production is going up.

Take another example. A company that I used to work for. All of the guys that I used to lead when I was a young shop steward there, they are 55 and above. And they are expensive. Companies have just started giving them packages and early pensions. They must go because their rate per hour is above the industry rates. The new and young workers are paid almost half of the old folks. So they’ve turned the plant upside down.

And these young workers, they don’t want to take part and be responsible for the union affairs unlike the old workers. At lunchtime when we have meetings,

they get in their cars and go to town.. But if they see something wrong, they will act spontaneously. The older workers want to go by the procedure, but for the younger workers that is too slow and cumbersome. They want action now, and at times with external political influence. No regards for the rules that are in place.

And the younger workers don’t see that they are getting anything useful from the union. They don’t have as much confidence in the unions. They don’t trust them. You must listen to the language they use in meetings - shop stewards or officials are being bribed by the employer or are corrupt. Without any proof or evidence.

Why do you think there is distrust between young workers and the unions?

AT TIMES IT COULD BE THAT WE DON’T deliver to their expectations. For example, there is an old tradition: when you go into a company as an official, before you go and speak to an employer, you must go and speak to workers first. But these days you do get union officials who will just sneak into the factory and be seen by workers when they are leaving. And that makes a lot of noise in the shopfloor, “That organiser was here, never came to speak to us”. Such things create mistrust amongst workers.

But the perceptions about closeness

of trade union leadership to management or whether that is a perception or it is real is another issue for another day. Although workers in some factories feel that leadership is in a close relationship with management.

We saw the problem that Num had which led to a massive drop in membership and the building of Amcu. And we know that in the big plants you are talking about, all the stories are that fulltime shop stewards now work for the HR department, they don’t work for the union anymore.

THAT’S PARTLY TRUE. IN SOMEplants, shop stewards are assigned with

“With the 4th Industrial Revolution, the workforce is sinking, but production is going up.”

Weakening of unions and erosion of worker control Amandla! interviews Mziyanda Twani, Numsa Eastern Cape Regional Secretary

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cars for the committee or even worse individually, at a less cost. Each full-time shop steward has his own office. Office bearers of the plant have got their own offices. Time spent on the shopfloor with workers is far less than what you would desire. They don’t take time to be in the lines, experience what workers are going through.

And all that leads to mistrust unfortunately. Organisational instability at times becomes the order of the day – a fight for the control of resources and not to serve workers’ interest per se. Once workers become aware that their leadership spends too much time on flights and in hotels it sometimes has repercussions for the unions.

And I suppose even more so the young workers who see that and don’t want to be part of it.

YES, THEY DON’T WANT TO BE PART of that arrangement. especially if they don’t see direct benefits to themselves. And employers have been so comfortable with the new arrangements of employer – union relations given the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. They are happier to meet with the union via virtual but deny the union to meet with its members on the basis that physical meetings are a super spreader. Some companies have even made arrangements to ensure that shop stewards are fully equipped with necessary tools to connect with them via virtual platforms.

But we are not able to create the very same virtual platform with our members to

talk to them as we are doing on a daily basis with employers. Why would workers not be discontent with trade unions, if this is our new reality?

If I am a full-time shop stewardat one of these companies and election time is coming, I face a terrible choice. If I’m not elected, my whole life will change. I will have to go back onto the shopfloor, do some real work and wear overalls. Obviously that is the last thing I want, so I will do anything I possibly can to get re-elected. How does that work?

YOU WILL DO ANYTHING & EVERYTHING that must bring you back to the office, otherwise you will not rest. Part of the current practices, which are not being spoken about, is the question of buying workers. Some leaders will not mind, at times with the help of service providers, to dish out money to ordinary workers, to ensure they are re-elected.

If we have got to this point in the existing trade unions, is there any hope of restoring them to some kind of worker control?

WE ARE PREPARING FOR ELECTIVEcongresses now. Part of the pertinent questions we must ponder on is the whole question of investment arms in trade unions in general. We must discuss our own experiences in the trade union movement in South Africa; the rest of the trade union movement; what is it

thatwe have learnt from Australia and from elsewhere about trade unions and corruption and investment arms. We must discuss whether these things are indeed required to be part of the trade union movement or not. And whether they are helping or not Because if we’ve got investment arms, for an example, why must we have factories closing, why investment arms are not coming to the party? This is but one example.

Part of trade union’s policies is that unions don’t invest in industries where they organise. But what if we were to convert these workplaces to embrace principles of cooperatives? Once

a factory is collapsing, the investment company comes in and intervenes and saves that. It must be for the intention of ensuring that job security for those workers in the first instance is guaranteed.

What you have described is a

picture of a trade union movement in crisis. How do we change?

THAT IS A GOOD QUESTION. IT’S A BIG ask. It’s something every trade union must ask itself. This must not be a question to be answered by leaders only but include the rank and file. That’s where answers will come from.

The balance of power on the shop floor has shifted and in the current moment, whether you like it or not, it resides with the employers now. Today it’s very easy to dismiss workers unlike before the new LRA. It’s very easy for employers to engage without fearing strike action from workers today. Before a strike, workers must think of their bonded houses and hire purchases they have with banks and various other financing institutions. And employers are alive to this reality.

So the balance of power has shifted tremendously away from workers to employers. And this will require a fundamental change of attitude from organised labour to change things around. A serious re-thinking of new ways of organizing and mobilising. A whole new attitude against the establishment is required by every exploited person.

If I’m not re-elected as a shop steward, my whole life will change. I will have to go back onto the shopfloor, do some real work and wear overalls… You will do anything and everything that must bring you back to the office, otherwise you will not rest.

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HEN WORKERS AT ANAmazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, decided to unionise, the trillion-

dollar company, marshalled by the world’s richest man, waged a war against them.

The warehouse - Amazon calls these facilities “fulfillment centers” - only opened in March 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic began rapidly spreading across the US. Bessemer is in the Deep South, in a “right to work” state, where workers aren’t required to pay dues to unions which represent them. This weakens unions and reflects the region’s long-standing hostility to worker organisation. This is an antagonism that the labour movement has tried to overcome, but never succeeded.

While Alabama has slightly higher union density than many other Southern states, that is an exceedingly low bar. In the United States as a whole, only 10.8 percent of workers are unionised. In the private sector, it’s a measly 6.3 percent.

Bessemer’s union historyThe residents of Bessemer have a storied industrial history. The small city, located near Birmingham, is named after Henry Bessemer, a British inventor and engineer who helped revolutionise the steel-making process. The region’s natural resources made it an ideal location for steel mills

With the rise of industry came worker organisation. Bessemer’s coal and iron-ore miners frequently went on strike. Communists in the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (Mine-Mill) organised multiracial union locals. They argued that the Southern workers’ movement needed to confront white supremacy if it wanted to defeat the bosses’ strategy of divide and rule. As historian Robin D. G. Kelley said of Mine-Mill, “the prevalence of Black workers and the union’s egalitarian goals gave the movement an air of civil rights activism.” The resulting militancy enabled workers to fight back even in the face of at times deadly repression, as the ruling class and the likes of the Ku Klux Klan tried to terrorise workers into submission.

Yet what the workers’ opponents could not achieve in the short term ultimately came to pass. The jobs in mines

and mills were engineered out of existence. Low-wage work now predominates in the Bessemer area, as in much of the country. Much of it is in the service sector; little of it is unionised. Poverty is high. This is the context into which Amazon entered.

Enter AmazonThe company was greeted with near-universal fanfare by local elected officials. Amazon pays below the prevailing wage in its industry and has been shown to lower wages at nearby warehouses. But the mega-corporation’s PR operation, combined with the unconscionably low federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (a number that has not been raised since 2009), allows the tech behemoth to present itself as a good opportunity.

But it didn’t take long for workers at the new warehouse in Bessemer to grow agitated. The company’s algorithmic despotism, its tracking of their movements down to the second and firing of those deemed insufficiently productive, led them to reach out to a union. They called the Retail, Warehouse, and Department Store Workers’ Union (RWDSU), which represents thousands of local poultry-processing plant workers and has recently tried to organise Amazon warehouse workers in New York City. By November of 2020, less than a year after the facility opened, the union drive went public, with

workers filing a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency that oversees union elections.

Amazon’s campaign against the unionAmazon wasted no time trying to destroy, dismantle, and demonise the campaign. It held “captive audience meetings”. In these, the employer requires workers to attend sessions in which management lies, fear-mongers, and testifies against unionising. Yes, a company that infamously does not allow workers adequate time to use the restroom miraculously found hours in their schedule to attend such meetings. Amazon deployed the finest lawyers money can buy to stall the union election process; delaying always helps the boss, as it extends the time he has to try to flip pro-union workers to opposing the union.

These lawyers were also determined to expand the size of the bargaining unit, and in this aim, they succeeded magnificently: while the union had filed for a 1,500-person unit, the NLRB ultimately agreed with the company that the correct number was 5,800. That gave the union the task of tracking down thousands more workers, including temporary and seasonal workers, and persuading them to back the organising drive.

Amazon wages war against unionsBy Alex Press

The Bessemer warehouse – Amazon calls these facilities “fulfilment centers” - initially planned to hire 1,500 workers. As the pandemic drove up sales numbers for Amazon, the workforce here ballooned to nearly 6,000 people.

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Other highlights of Amazon’s anti-union campaign (an effort that, it should be noted, likely cost the company millions of dollars) include papering the warehouse’s bathroom stalls with anti-union propaganda and having workers who were ineligible to be in the union wear “Vote No” badges on the shop floor.

The vote and its aftermathFear, exhaustion, confusion, resentment: whip these bad feelings up and tie them to the union, that’s the boss’s strategy. Employers do it because it works. When the NLRB counted the vote in late March of 2021, after an extended mail-in balloting period, the result was 738 for the union, and 1,798 against. Amazon challenged 400 ballots: the union’s president, Stuart Appelbaum, told me the company challenged every ballot cast on the final day of voting, when the union had the momentum. Accounting for the challenges,

they say roughly 1,100 workers voted union.As of this writing, the two sides are

testifying before the NLRB. The union alleges that Amazon broke the law, which the company naturally denies. Among the allegations are that Amazon had keys to a ballot-filled mailbox it demanded the United States Post Office (USPS) install outside of the warehouse. That seems to be a direct violation of the NLRB’s decision that the company could not have a dropbox for ballots. If the evidence is sustained, the NLRB will likely order a rerun of the union election.

Whatever the outcome at the NLRB, the thing to keep in mind is that in the

United States a company doesn’t have to break the law to infringe on workers’ rights to self-determination, democracy, free speech, and assembly. Captive audience meetings are legal. Determining the scope of a bargaining unit, as Amazon did in this case, is legal. Even when employers are found to have violated the law, the punishment is effectively nonexistent.

Workers must organise globallyAmazon operates globally, and it is at that level that our organising must take place. The company builds redundancies into its network of warehouses so it can reroute goods around any facility where workers are restive. For instance, German Amazon workers have gone on strike several times, and the company responded by building facilities in Poland, where workers receive lower wages. Rather than accede to these

national divisions, or allow resentment to fester, German and Polish Amazon workers began organising together in 2015 under the banner of Amazon Workers International. UNI Global Union likewise helps coordinate across the different unions representing workers at Amazon facilities across Europe. This is the scale at which organising must operate if it hopes to evade Amazon’s efforts to crush it.

Where Amazon does not yet operate, it will soon. The company is dedicated to expanding until it becomes the infrastructure of our daily routines. Usually, Amazon’s strategy when entering new markets is to throw money at the

operation so it can quickly bury itself into the life of a country’s residents, leapfrogging past domestic competitors and generating momentum before unions, regulators, or any other opponents can mobilise against it. By the time its presence registers, it has burrowed too deep. Workers need to be ready before the threat emerges, with a clear strategy for stopping the company from entering, subverting, and undermining existing labour standards and regulations.

Workers around the world can take note of Amazon’s actions in Bessemer and draw inspiration from the workers’ efforts to wrest power away from the company. The result was a setback, but a union in the United States has finally taken on the challenge of organising an Amazon facility in a serious way. It is not only here that the labour movement is weak; workers are undergoing casualisation, fragmentation, and disorganisation around

the globe. It will require unions to take risks to overcome this. When they lose workers, they should metabolise what worked and what didn’t, incorporating that knowledge into future organising strategy.

Amazon has global ambitions, and it will take a global effort to stop it. What was already one of the world’s most powerful corporations has been

supercharged by the events of the past year. As one Wall Street analyst put it, the pandemic has “injected Amazon with a growth hormone.” The company, always trying to grow fast, has ballooned, hiring hundreds of thousands of people just in the United States alone.

Yet by swallowing the world, it also brings us together inside of its empire, connecting forces that can destroy it. We know what Amazon’s vision for the coming years looks like; it’s up to us to struggle for a different future, and to win.

Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine.

It didn’t take long for workers at the new warehouse in Bessemer to grow agitated. The company’s algorithmic despotism, its tracking of their movements down to the second and firing of those deemed insufficiently productive, led them to reach out to a union.

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the state of the workers’ movement

FEATURE

the state of the workers’ movement

When it comes to organising workers, what is the strategic thinking? What do you want to achieve?

WE DON’T HAVE Astrategy really. What we have done is to consciously structure what was before very chaotic work when people could walk into any EFF offices, and we didn’t have processes. But also, this led to people abusing EFF’s name without the organisation being aware. Normally, we wait for a particular worker or a group of workers in a specific institution to say, “Please come and help us here, we have a case of unfair dismissal or unfair treatment, or there is racism.”

We are not a labour union, and employers use that quite often to prevent us. So the first thing that we do, we call them, “My name is Hlengiwe Mkaliphi;

I am head of EFF Labour Desk; we have received a complaint in regards to unfair treatment of workers in your organisation. Can we meet and sit down?”

That’s all. Some just reply through lawyers, “If you are not going to stop, we will take you to court, blah, blah.” We will be patient with them. We reply again, “Yes, we are not a labour union, we understand that. But we have an interest because this case has been reported to us.” If they still insist they don’t want us to meet, we organise to go and picket outside their premises.

Other employers get scared. They call us, “No, let us meet, let us resolve it. What is it that you want to achieve?” And we reply, “No we don’t want to achieve anything. We want you to address what is raised here. In the first letter, we have given to you exactly what the workers are raising. So if we can meet and resolve those cases one by one.”

So that’s what we normally do. If

an organisation doesn’t want to resolve workers’ concerns, we also advise our workers to go to CCMA. There is a new amendment in the BCEA, section 73(a). If a worker is owed money, the CCMA can deal with it instead of the Labour Court. And you know it would be very expensive for just an ordinary person to go to a labour court.

We have established a very good relationship with the CCMA, although we are not allowed to represent workers there. What we normally do is we prepare the workers. We call them in the office, and we tell them, “We are not going to be with you there, but we will be there inside observing. So these are the points.” So now there’s an improvement because before workers, especially the vulnerable workers, would keep quiet there. And those commissioners, because they also want to finish their cases in front of them, will not help workers.

EFF organises and represents workersHlengiwe Mkhaliphi, Head of EFF Labour Desk, interviewed by Mazibuko Jara

“If companies still insist they don’t want us to meet, we organise to go and picket outside their premises.”

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You mention preparing your labour desk members, activists. I guess you take them through labour law training?

YES, NORMALLY WE ASK THE CCMA, “Come guys, come and give us the training”. I have 10 activists here who have matric, others who don’t have matric. But when we recruit, we also emphasise that: please can we have activists who have clarity in terms of the labour laws.

But I also conduct classes myself as well. I listen to them, “What are the challenges? How did you resolve them?”. They say, “No, no, no, we still have a problem, I don’t know this LRA.” And I say, “No, you must go with your conscious. Don’t just concentrate on labour laws. Be an activist. Those things you’ll get inside when you fight. And if you get stuck, you must call a person with labour law skills”.

So that’s how we tackle our cases. Also, in our HQ we have lawyers on standby who advise daily.

I guess you also have comrades on the ground who are EFF members but have trade union experience.

YOU KNOW, SINCE WE STARTED THE labour desk, there’s a mushrooming of unions. That’s why I’m also very, very strict in terms of the coordination of the labour desk. We are saying this thing must

be decentralised so that if there is a case at Mnquma Local Municipality in one village, you must not wait until you go to East London. So when you coordinate your Labour Desk in the Eastern Cape, you must go down as far as your sub-region.

What they normally do these comrades, if they see there is no proper monitoring, they go to a particular company. They see an opportunity, and they go to register a union. Then they go back to those workers to say, “Now there is an EFF union that will help you”. Workers will be very interested, “Yeah, I am resigning from my old union. EFF has a union”. Later on, when they get stuck because they don’t know even the labour laws, they come back and say, “Labour desk, please help us”.

We are not a union as a labour desk, and at some point when we want to go inside to talk to employers, they normally tell us no, we’ve got nothing to do with political parties.

We ask workers who have invited us into a company, “Do you have a union?” “Yes, we have a union.” “How is your relationship with your union? Are you still happy with your union?”. “No, we are still happy”. “Ok, let’s work with them, just for us to gain entrance.” Once we go inside with the union, then we’ll be fighting that company together with the union.

We have won so many cases. I think when we started the labour desk in

September, we had a system whereby we said people must call in or send WhatsApp messages. On one single day, it was 10,000 messages. The next day we received 18,000 messages. In the third day, messaging were increasing and the system crashed. And then the President called me on the third day to say, “What is the strategy? How are you going to do this?” And I said, “What I’m going to do is to activate provincial labour desks.”

So we called the deputy chairpersons of the EFF in the provinces. We said, “You are going to be the head of the labour desk in your provinces. Go and set up your structure in the regions”.

At a national level, we have a coordinator and six volunteers. We put our WhatsApp numbers on Twitter and Facebook. When they call us, we disseminate their info to provinces, and we encourage them to go to offices of the EFF across the country.

So far, according to our records, what we have received, the number is 37 076, and out of that 37,000, we have resolved 22,866.

And how are the older unions responding, not the new ones?

AH, THE UNIONS ARE VERY MUCH against it. Let me give one example. I called the CEO of Sun International after I got the news that he has retrenched 2,400 black

North-West EFF lead a march to Sun City. “I called the CEO of Sun International after I got the news that he has retrenched 2,400 black workers in Sun City. Let me understand why only black people have been retrenched.”

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workers in Sun City. And then I called him, “Let us meet chief. Let me understand why only black people have been retrenched”.

He agreed to the meeting, and then toward the meeting date, he said, no, Saccawu is telling him not to accept me to sit down with him. I said, “No, I’m not accountable to Saccawu. I’m coming to you, you agreed.” Then he asks, “Are you coming as MP or as EFF Labour Desk, because I have nothing to do with a political party?” And I say, “Do you want me to come naked? I must not come with my EFF thingies. I’ll come naked, but I’m coming”.

When we sat down, and we asked him, “Why are you telling us about Saccawu?” In terms of the law, he said those workers have embarked on the processes of section 189 of the LRA and the union was there and everything was done according to the books. So the Head Office of the union also said, no, we must not meet with you.

It means that Saccawu is doing something very wrong.

But before we spoke about the 2,400 retrenched black workers, some workers had just staged a protest. And then management was so angry that they issued letters of suspension.

And then we said to them, “No, what is the problem?” They told us there are two unions, and they are fighting – Saccawu and the other union in Sun City. They are competing. So I said let us be the voice of reason as EFF. We are going to talk to both unions. But you must withdraw those suspension letters - there were 27 workers. We spoke to those people. We said, “Hey chief, comrades stop this thing of being misled by the union. You know, recently 2,400 people in the same institution have

been retrenched; you will follow suit. These people are very cruel.”

And they managed to reverse everything, and the union got undermined. They were very angry. They even sent me an SMS saying that, “Wena, you are declaring war when you see me on the street”. I said, “There’s no need, let’s just sit down. This war needs all of us”.

I even went to meet Vavi when we started EFF Labour Desk. I told him that I came to him because I know he’s a seasoned leader and has experience. Let us share some ideas. And he also welcomed us, but he was not happy. He wanted to know what we wanted to achieve, asking if we were planning to form a union.

As an experienced person who has been there, we asked him, “Why are the unions failing?” He shared some experiences and some of his views with us, but he wanted to know, “OK but this labour desk, where does this thing go?” We told him, “No, we are just occupying the space fighting for workers for now, and it will be up to the Central Command Team to decide if there is a union that is going to be formed. But we don’t have a long-term goal to form a union. I don’t want to lie.”

The traditional form of unions is the traditional form of workplace organising. But for about 10 years now it has been clear that form is not adequate; it seems to be structurally limited.

YOU’RE QUITE RIGHT JARA, YOU’RE quite right. My opinion is that when we are fighting for workers, we also need to pronounce on the laziness of unions. There are so many examples I can give to you.

Here in Parliament, there is Nehawu. But there is an issue of temporary workers who have been on fixed-term contracts for 20 years.

So at least they have also come to the fore and reactivated. We work like that without recognising them because, at some point, we don’t have to. It’s their job. They even charge these people. The fact of the matter was they also thought that we were going to form a union, and you know, people want something that is tangible. So if EFF forms a union, I’m sure people will be very interested because they see the work of the EFF labour desk. But we are not there yet.

Where do you see this work going Where do you see this work going over the next year at least, particularly over the next year at least, particularly when it comes to what happens after when it comes to what happens after the case is resolved. How do the the case is resolved. How do the workers remain organised?workers remain organised?

AFTER WE ENTER THEIR COMPANIES,we convert them to a labour forum of some sort. Not in terms of the Act, but our labour forum, to organise them. We say, “Okay, there are 30 of you; let’s elect 10 people. There must be a coordinator and a convenor amongst yourselves. You must remain coordinated. If there is an issue, you must sit down as workers, and you must talk about those issues. If you need to go and approach your employer, you must go and approach your employer. If you get stuck, you must call us. The office is there”. But we encourage them to take up their issues. They must not be cry babies. If workers remain unorganised, they are always going to cause havoc in the country.

EFF Tshwane Labour Desk volunteers demand that Bettabets management in Soshanguve and Mamelodi comply with BCEA. “If workers remain unorganised, they are always going to cause havoc in the country.”

FEATURE

the state of the workers’ movement

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N 26TH APRIL 2017, THE HIGHCourt delivered what was ultimately a death-blow to Jacob Zuma’s nuclear build

programme. This was undoubtedly one of the most important judgements in South Africa’s history. The “nuclear deal”, estimated to be around 1 trillion rand, would no doubt have crippled the South African economy and entrenched a dangerous patronage network with ties to an authoritarian Russian state. Instead, civil society delivered us respite through the courts. Those involved are owed much.

Nuclear back on the agendaThat said, the removal of Jacob Zuma has not taken nuclear power off the table for South Africa. Indeed, as in the most recent IRP, under Minister Gwede Mantashe, “the expected decommissioning of 24,100 MW of coal-fired power plants supports the need for additional capacity from clean energy technologies including nuclear”. It takes the decision to “commence preparations for a nuclear build programme to the extent of 2,500 MW.” Koeberg currently provides 1,860 MW.

Once again civil society is gearing up to oppose any nuclear build. For many, Koeberg should not even be

recommissioned beyond its current decommission date in 2024. This decommissioning is highly unlikely to take place, and it might be difficult to stop the proposed new nuclear build programme if its processes follow a less dubious approach than Zuma’s. But given the ongoing Karpowership procurement scandal, better processes also seem unlikely!

Regardless of its prospects for success, is there an argument that much of the opposition to nuclear energy is unfounded? The public discourse around nuclear energy is largely unhelpful in examining the technology. It should in my view, start with two undeniable facts:

● nuclear energy is a zero-emission clean source of power; and

● we are nowhere close to slowing down climate change.

Do we not owe it to ourselves and the planet to give it a closer look?

Is nuclear dangerous?Nuclear energy is widely perceived as a dangerous technology, either because of potential reactor meltdowns ala Chernobyl, or because of its highly radioactive waste. But reality demonstrates that such reservations are overwhelmingly unfounded.

As dangerous and clean as… wind and solar? The data tells the story. Nuclear energy, at least in terms of deaths, is one of the safest technologies. In fact, considering it displaces coal, one could argue that it has saved lives.

Events like Chernobyl were devastating. Certain areas surrounding it remain uninhabitable. The initial death toll was 31 people and there remains intense debate around the number of long-term deaths from radiation and subsequent diseases. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), it was around 4,000. This was clearly a tragedy. But this is also technology that has been around for 70 years with just two major disasters. Despite Cold War propaganda to the contrary, Chernobyl was not a nuclear blast. In fact it was a build up of steam that blew off the reactor casing. And the complicity of a decaying Soviet government coupled with old technology was central to the disaster.

Fukushima, the other disaster on everyone’s mind, is widely misunderstood. Rather than from direct radiation, the death toll of 573 was entirely due to the evacuation. Hence the victims were overwhelming the elderly. The estimates

The closure of the Indian Point power plant in New York led to a 35% increase in power emissions and 46% increase in carbon intensity for New York state. Hopefully this serves as a lesson against not recommissioning Koeberg in 2024.

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of the long-term deaths range from 1,000 to just the one confirmed death of a worker through radiation-induced lung cancer. One also can’t separate this incident from the natural disaster that triggered it, and as with Chernobyl, Fukushima was not a nuclear blast.

Even irrespective of whether or not they were nuclear blasts, when compared to coal, these numbers are simply negligible. Eskom’s plants alone are estimated to kill over 2,200 people a year. Some estimates put the global toll for fossil energy at 4 million a year – still more than all recorded deaths from Covid-19.

What about the waste? There’s no denying it: nuclear power produces waste that is dangerous for up to 100,000 years. But how big a problem is this?

What most people do not know is that only 4% of nuclear waste cannot be re-used as fuel and just 1% is radioactive beyond 300 years. In fact, nuclear power produces relatively little radioactive waste compared to other industrial processes. For example, in the US 5% of industrial waste is radioactive, but just 10% of that 5% of radioactive waste (0.5% of general industrial waste) is from nuclear energy.

But it remains true that this is still incredibly dangerous waste that requires constant management and maintenance. That in turn would require some sort of political stability... forever.

Fortunately, Finland has come up with a solution - the Onkalo Nuclear Waste facility. Deep in the bedrock of Finland, tunnels have been, and are being, dug that will seal nuclear waste with what is essentially guaranteed safety. Utilising clay and concrete, the waste is no danger to the environment or humans – at least, for humans in society as we know it. The workers at Onkalo are struggling with an almost philosophical issue. How do you stop curious humans from digging up the waste in some distant future? Whatever signs or language used to deter people may no longer make sense and even draw people (or aliens!) in.

But is this quandary, regarding an extremely distant potential threat, larger than the immediate threat of climate

change and deaths through continued reliance on fossil fuels for baseload and reactive power.

Suicidal closuresUnfortunately, there are many who do see the distant threat as greater. And the consequences are staggering. Negative public opinion on nuclear power has resulted in a series of nuclear plant closures. The most absurd example is in Germany. Closing its plants required the ramping up of supply from other sources due to the variability of its renewable generators.

Guess where this power came from? Research found that replacement of nuclear power with coal led to a 13% increase in emissions and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from 2011 to 2017. Similar increases have happened

in parts of the US and Japan. The closure of the Indian Point power plant led to a 35% increase in power emissions and 46% increase in carbon intensity for New York state. Hopefully this serves as a lesson against not recommissioning Koeberg in 2024.

Closures of nuclear plants have repercussions beyond increased emissions. Nuclear power offers highly-skilled, well-paid jobs which are often accompanied by strong organised labour. By forcing the closure of nuclear plants, environmentalists continue to drive a wedge between workers and the climate. The Indian Point closure, that has been replaced by two gas plants, is an object lesson. The local union has managed to relocate most of its workers into other jobs whilst ensuring retirement packages for others. However, 1,000 clean energy jobs are soon to disappear, alongside two-thirds of the tax revenue for the local town. The community is devasted, and nuclear power workers, who should

be seen as climate heroes, will blame environmentalists for their plight. Workers in clean energy can, and have to be, the leaders of the transition; but so long as they keep losing quality jobs in clean energy, they will only increase their resistance to renewable energy which can offer significantly fewer operating jobs and usually lower pay.

The hard climate reality is that nuclear energy remains the best means of delivering clean power. It has already prevented billions of tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

There is an important metric for a power plant – its “capacity factor”. Power plants have a theoretical output capacity – what they are able to produce under permanently ideal circumstances. The capacity factor of a power plant is the percentage of that ideal theoretical output

it actually generates over time. For a nuclear power plant, the capacity factor is close to 90%. It actually produces 90% of its ideal theoretical capacity. For wind and solar plants? Good weather conditions get a capacity factor of about 25% for solar, whilst wind can get up to 44% onshore and 52% offshore. Nuclear power should be a strong complement to renewable energy. It can provide the

residual load and reactive power that renewables don’t provide. And, nuclear energy can charge storage devices coupled to renewables during low demand periods at night.

And it seems that few opponents of nuclear energy want to acknowledge that the alternative as a complement to renewable energy is natural gas. This is an environmental disaster, not least because of its methane emissions.

But is it economically feasible?No doubt about it, nuclear energy is expensive and slow to come online, making it economically “risky”. If you’re paying close attention to the discourse, this is the primary argument being made against nuclear, as many people have had to concede on the other arguments. A nuclear plant takes at least six years to construct, and depending on interest rates, this becomes expensive. Further, on average nuclear energy only becomes more profitable than gas after 17 years.

Research found that replacement of nuclear power with coal led to a 13% increase in emissions and likely killed an additional 1,100 people per year from 2011 to 2017.

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This is why nuclear engineers are trying to develop smaller reactors, and progress is being made.

But as the Left, are we primarily focused on profits for something we should be delivering as a public good? Should we not welcome the significant employment and high-skilled labour associated with long-term nuclear energy projects and plant lifespans, which are also so favourable to unionisation?

Nuclear is risky for short terms profits yes, but risky for a long-term energy strategy to reach net-zero emissions? Not so much. France’s nuclear build out before the onset of neoliberalism was the fastest decarbonisation process in history. It was achieved through a public-sector utility enjoying substantial resources and political support. Nuclear energy needs a strong public sector and that explains the motives of its many free-market and energy liberalisation critics.

ExtractivismOther arguments against nuclear energy relate to the mining of uranium and weapons. On the former, the mining of uranium can’t be separated from the mining of

other elements. The waste from all mining practices – including those for renewables - is incredibly hazardous. However, in all cases this waste can be treated and stored relatively safely. Where this doesn’t happen it’s because these are companies not interested in paying more for their externalities. As with most things, we need to either regulate, or take mining under public ownership to guarantee safe waste disposal.

In addition, one uranium fuel pellet of

6 grams has the energy equivalent of one ton of coal, 450 litres of oil or 400 cubic meters of gas. The quantity of extraction required is much smaller and not just for “fuel”.

Nuclear energy also offers an advantage with respect to the so-called “post-petroleum resource race” for the various minerals required for renewable energy and electric vehicles. I have my doubts that capital will struggle to find the oil resources to meet demand, and, historically reserves have consistently been discovered as production increases. However, and in general, the less mining required the better, and nuclear power has the lowest mineral requirements among clean energy sources. And the chromium it requires is relatively abundant. In fact, South Africa accounts for more than a third of the world’s production.

The nuclear arms issueThere are claimed to be around 14,000 warheads in the world, although there are almost certainly more. Are we truly worried about countries which don’t have them developing them through nuclear power?

Twenty-four countries have nuclear power but no warheads. And moving

from nuclear power to nuclear weapons is a massive undertaking. This is why so few countries have done it and why we always know about those countries that are trying to do it. The risk is incredibly low; and, whilst Iran and North Korea are reprehensible regimes, are we so strongly against them developing warheads when the US and Israel have them? A global campaign led by the Left and anti-war movement needs to disarm and destroy

warheads for good. This is a separate issue from nuclear energy.

Forward to a South African nuclear future?Given all of the above, nuclear having a key role in our energy future seems to be an urgent necessity. However, considering the Medupi and Kusile builds, there’s massive reason for concern around mega-projects like nuclear power plants in South Africa. The necessary safety measures for the technology should also give one pause, given the condition of the South African state. Many of our world-renowned nuclear experts have been driven from Eskom as well.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy is looking to complete procurement by 2024 and this is why vigilance is still required and why we remain in debt to so many activists in our country. But if the argument from the Left is that the South African government will never be able to oversee large infrastructure projects, then we are delivering ourselves into a neoliberal future of privatisation across key sectors. This is giving up on a just transition - you can forget about a

super grid, high-speed rail, and green fuels. Surely those who believe in a socialist

future can believe in delivering safe and reliable nuclear power. The focus must be on reclaiming and transforming a devastated public sector that is increasingly in the cross-hairs of the Treasury - the climate depends on it.

Bruce Baigrie is a Political Organiser and Researcher at the AIDC.

The rapid deployment of clean energy technologies as part of energy transitions implies a significant increase in demand for minerals.

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N NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, MINERALSand Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe issued a determination. This commenced the process to procure

the new nuclear energy generation capacity of 2 500 MW as per decision 8 of the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2019. This article draws on groundWork’s comment to the National Energy Regulator.

The IRP 2019 is a deeply flawed document for five main reasons:

● The advice that Eskom coal plants should not have to comply with the law on minimum emission standards in Decision 3;

● The build limits imposed on renewables in Decision 5;

● The inclusion of new fossil fuel plants despite the evident intensification of the climate crisis;

● The fantasy of clean coal in Decision 6; ● The nuclear folly in Decision 8 which

says, without evidence, that it is a “no-regret” option.

A folly is not only a piece of foolishness; it is also an extravagance built for appearance or status. groundWork opposes it for the following main reasons:1. Environmental damage done in the

mining and processing of uranium. At present, radioactive dust blows from the mine dumps on the Rand and particularly the West Rand. The nuclear regulator has no plan, and apparently no will, to deal with it. It may be that South Africa will procure fuel from France or somewhere else. This merely displaces the problem – the uranium mining areas of Mali are heavily contaminated.

2. Energy consumption and pollution. Following the mining process, fuel fabrication is energy intensive and polluting.

3. Lack of any feasible plan to deal with high level nuclear waste. At present, high level waste from Koeberg is stored under water on site while low level waste is dumped at Vaalputs. Eskom doesn’t have

a long term plan for the high level waste, nor is it putting aside actual money to provide for it. Given the very long half life of uranium, a high level nuclear dump site must be safe, and monitored and managed for several hundred thousand years. The assumption that the present civilisation will last that long is presumptuous. In the short term, the potential for waste spills increases with the quantity of waste.

4. Cost. The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) regularly repeats the phrase “at a pace and scale that the country can afford”, as if repetition will make it affordable. And it periodically pretends to have information on costs which it cannot divulge for reasons of security or confidentiality. Outside of the nuclear lobby, nobody believes it. Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter recently gave a ball park figure of R1.80 / kWh for nuclear against 60c or 70c/kWh for renewables.

5. Overruns. That is before cost and time overruns. In 2009, we predicted that the construction of Medupi and Kusile would end in tears with cost and time overruns. Various politicians then implied that we lacked patriotism. Their “patriotism”, however, now constitutes the most significant threat to national stability. New nuclear builds are notoriously prone to cost and time overruns.

6. Corruption. They are also prone to corruption at the top level of the states involved in any nuclear deal – as with the aborted Russian deal. The corruption, then, is not merely about money, but also about geo-political leverage over the “recipient” country. This is profoundly anti-democratic.

7. Anti-democratic tendencies. Nuclear power also promotes anti-democratic tendencies within the structures of state and industry. By its nature, the fuel requires high levels of security, both because it is radioactive and

because of its potential for use in weapons. Hence, nuclear technologies tend to promote state security agencies which thrive on secrecy. Moreover, when those security agencies are corruptly involved in manipulating politics and or taking money, as South Africa’s SSA has been, they can be expected to act in ways that are hostile to democracy. Security agencies are also linked to the relevant divisions of energy, minerals and trade departments and private transnational or national corporations, as well as transnational state owned corporations such as EDF or Rosatom. The result is a tightly networked group with a common interest in evading scrutiny and accountability.

8. Decommissioning. Nuclear power stations cost as much to decommission as to build, and they are similarly subject to time and budget overruns and very vulnerable also to corruption. At the point of decommissioning there is no future income to pay for it. It is of concern that Eskom does not appear to have put aside the money to decommission Koeberg (or any other of its power stations). We surmise that the extension to its design life has to do with this as well as with Eskom’s capacity shortfall.

The impactEnvironmental impacts are felt by people all along the fuel supply chain and the unresolved waste disposal chain. Impacts at the plant include the exposure of workers to the infrastructure relating to cooling (usually using sea water) and the return of heated water to marine environments. In the long term, however, at decommissioning the site may well be left contaminated by radioactivity – particularly if:

● inadequate provision is made for decommissioning,

● the requisite technical capacities are lost or were never developed;

There is a lack of any feasible plan to deal with high level nuclear waste. At present, high level waste from Koeberg is stored under water on site while low level waste is dumped at Vaalputs.

By David Hallowes

Against

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 24

● the plant is stranded before decommissioning for economic reasons; or

● the site has to be abandoned because of a catastrophic accident or event.

On the last point, nuclear plants are not insurable because the costs of catastrophic events such as Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima are potentially limitless. For this reason, risk is assigned to the state. Lesser incidents are more frequent. But, big or small, the authorities and the utilities invariably cover up incidents as far as they can and deny the extent of impact when they can’t. This is an element of our concern around secrecy.

The impact of climate change on nuclear power stations over a 50 year design life are potentially large. They include flooding, air and sea temperature rise, sea level rise and increased earthquake activity as the earth’s crust responds to the loss of ice mass at the poles.

The baseload mythNuclear power is often promoted on the basis of a claim that it provides low carbon “baseload” and grid stability. We consider baseload to be a red herring. The issue is whether the system has sufficient flexibility to follow the demand load. A renewable system requires a flexible grid to equalise variable generation across geographic space, as well as ample storage.

All power systems require storage. Base supply plants are inflexible and run at more or less constant speed. South Africa has four pumped storage schemes which use surplus power at night to pump water uphill ready to generate power during peak demand times. The system is also backed up by diesel fired “peaking power” plants which are polluting, very expensive to run and may be damaged if over-used – as they are.

A renewable system needs much more capacity and much more storage but the system cost is already much lower than for a baseload system fired by coal or nuclear. And that’s without even counting the cost of pollution. The cost of renewable generation has

fallen dramatically in the last decade, and the cost of various storage options is now falling fast. Such storage should include renewable biogas from municipal sewerage and composting plants, but not fossil gas plants. It should also include gravity storage along with pumped storage, batteries and fuel cells etc.

Biogas is a preferred option because it does double duty as a municipal energy and treatment plant. The gas is used at source to minimise leaks, and it can be used flexibly at peak times. Gravity storage is preferred because it can be used on different scales (from deep mineshaft to urban high rise), it occupies minimal space compared with pumped storage, and it is not polluting and has minimal pollution in the supply chain.

The extractivism problemA renewables system will require a great deal of metal. The environmental impacts

will be much less than from fossil fuels but groundWork remains concerned. Producing such metals within the logic of extractivism transferrs wealth as well as materials to the centres of imperial capital for reinvestment in never ending growth. Meanwhile, people at the dirty end of global production will still be pushed aside, their rivers will be poisoned and they will face large and growing piles of toxic tailings.

Hence, to put it very briefly, a just transition is about the rapid and revolutionary change from an unjust and coercive extractive political economy to a regenerative economy founded on justice and equality for all.

David Hallowes is a researcher at groundWork, an environmental justice organisation.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 25

CLIMATE CRISIS

Green ColonialismBy Tshiamo Malatji

N ENVIRONMENTALISM THAT relies on an imperialist organisation of the world is not an environmentalism

that serves Africa. The Green New Deal (GND), packaged as the most ambitious environmental policy change in the West, falls short.

Green New DealThe GND is a framework for a varying set of policies to end the use of fossil fuels in the US and transition to renewable energy, creating new climate jobs and halting carbon emissions. It responds to the greenhouse effect of carbon energy which warms our planet and causes climate

shocks such as sea-level rise, wildfires, and cyclones. It’s clear that the use of fossil fuels needs to be terminated and the GND is a radical agenda to achieve that.

However, lurking in this policy is an implicit message that the West’s energy use can be maintained by renewable energy, and there is no need to change wider energy-use patterns. Mark Jacobson is director of Stanford’s Atmosphere/Energy Program. He states in analysing the GND, “At least 37 papers among 11 independent research groups find that the electric grid can stay stable at low cost with at or near 100 percent wind-water-solar.”

Jacobson is saying the United States can use the same amount of energy in the same ways under the GND. While there is no commitment yet to specific policies, it’s the most widely-known exact plan so far.

But, just like fossil fuels, renewable energy requires expansive raw resource material in order to meet energy demand. This is especially true if the proponents of the GND want to transition quickly while maintaining high energy use. “Vehicles,

panels and turbines require copper, lithium and cobalt”. The majority of the world’s cobalt, for instance, is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt mining has been linked to child labour, informal armies, and dispossession or displacement. But related conflict and oppression is true for general resource extraction in Africa.

And these green policies may create an even greater demand for resources. The OECD’s Global Resources Outlook estimates that the use of metals will quadruple, from 8 gigatonnes in 2011 to 32 gigatonnes in 2060.

Ultimately, the GND relies on capitalist exploitation to meet its vision.

The capitalist doctrine uses its capital and power to seize the productive capacities of others to create goods. A GND that seizes resources from Africa is maintaining capitalist relations. In this context, “Democratic Socialism” is a double misnomer. It is not socialist to exploit Africa’s mineral resources and it is not democratic to collude with war-sponsoring leaders or paramilitaries to achieve this, ignoring the effects of extractivism on the majority of Africans.

EcosocialismEnvironmentalists in the US should consider ecosocialism - an alternative framework that does not rely on extractivism. If we don’t have the means to create something, we must find another way. If there aren’t enough resources to build a lot of cars, we must invest in community transport initiatives, such as buses and trains. If there aren’t enough resources to build turbines, we must simply use less energy or find ways to

collaborate on energy use. A good model is South Africa’s Climate Justice Charter, which offers ecosocialist alternatives for energy, transport, housing and various ways of life.

There is also an inconvenient truth here. Some models of living are unsustainable and cannot be maintained under ecosocialism. Luxury goods and services are only made possible through exploitation. Ecosocialism means changing the way we live. It’s possible that many people living in the West, even environmentalists, don’t want to change their lives of convenience. But it is unjust and unsustainable to meet one’s desires at the expense of oppressed people - and especially by oppressing them.

In any case, it is only a privileged minority that benefits from the West’s riches. So, environmentalists in the West should be anticapitalist and rally people against these wealthy people and corporations.

We can also find optimism in ecosocialist living. This way of life brings communities together and fosters cooperation.

Ultimately, the GND might stop one of the world’s greatest polluters, the US, and help prevent the end of the world as we know it. But it will also maintain the current world as we know it - a world that oppresses Africa. The GND saves the world, but it does not change it.

Tshiamo Malatji is an organiser in Bloemfontein, South Africa, focusing on climate change, food sovereignty and post-natural building as modes of responding to ecological crises.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 26

CLIMATE CRISIS

EVEN YEARS AGO NUMSA was expelled from Cosatu. To all in the workers’ movement, that was a seismic shock. The biggest union

in the federation – in Africa in fact – one of the founding unions and driving forces behind the formation of Cosatu. What were the heinous crimes that merited such treatment?

In the end, Numsa’s main crime was its call to break with the Tripartite Alliance and to stop support for the ANC. It was a split around support for a political party.

So why is it all happening again?There is nothing that is more certain

to create serious tension in a federation than an attempt to wed that federation to a political party. Nothing is more guaranteed to lead to division and even splits, in what is already a far too fractured scenario.

But Saftu is at war with itself over whether to support Numsa’s SRWP or a Mass Workers Party.

Back to class basicsThe primary reason for a trade union to join a federation is that it offers the opportunity to multiply its power. This happens in two broad ways:

● Affiliates in a federation may support the mass actions of other affiliates with actions of their own – solidarity actions.

● Affiliates can join together to put pressure on the government to support issues that are in its interests, and in the interests of the working class as a whole.

If a federation sticks to those functions, it can build itself into a powerful and united force for the interests of its affiliates’ members and for the working class more broadly.

But it seems that we don’t understand the difference between a mass organisation of the working class – such as a trade union or community organisation – and a political party.

The purpose of a mass working class organisation is to bring together the maximum number of working class people around issues that unite them. And there is no shortage of such issues. Apart from wages, there are all the material conditions in townships and informal settlements, the delivery of public services. Today, the pandemic and vaccination are working class issues. Nobody in Saftu will disagree with the need to massively upgrade health facilities, for example.

The purpose of a party, on the other hand, is to bring people together around a common set of ideas. A vision of a desirable society and, hopefully, a strategy for getting there. The broad working class is not united around such a vision, let alone around a strategy. That’s why there is more than one political organisation claiming to represent the interests of the working class.

Look at KZN in the late `80s and early `90s. It was well known and accepted that Cosatu affiliates at that time contained members of ANC and of Inkatha. Those organisations were at war with each other in the communities.

If there was any need for evidence

of the difference between a mass class organisation and a political party, Numsa gave it unequivocally in 2019. Its 360,000 members turned into 24,439 votes. Or not even that, because many of the votes may have come from non-Numsa members.

So what does Numsa think it will gain by winning the support of Saftu for its SRWP? Numsa has about half the total

number of Saftu members. Does it expect to double its 24,439 votes by winning Saftu’s support? It seems that it is a battle being fought at immense risk for a non-existent prize. It is actually very unlikely to make any real difference whether or not Saftu passes a resolution to support the SRWP.

So let’s stick to trying to win activists to join a political party on the basis of its record and programme, rather than doing it by “winning” structures and organisations. That’s the kind of winning that has value.

Just to be clear. We are talking about federation support for political parties here. We are not saying that federations should avoid uniting around political issues. On the contrary.

So we are simply saying this: there is no real benefit to trying to win a trade union federation to support a particular political party. If individual affiliates wish to do that, it is their perfect right to do so. But leave the federation to pursue common working class interests. Otherwise you end up talking constantly about unity because your practice is causing disunity.

What do we mean by a

Federation?By Amandla! editorial staff

But it seems that we don’t understand the difference between a mass organisation of the working class – such as a trade union or community organisation – and a political party.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 27

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY

S PEOPLE DEDICATED TO THE radical restructuring of our society, it is for us to imagine the world otherwise. This short

piece asks you to become more open to the possibility that what our society needs is not better policing, but less. And ultimately no policing at all.

When one of the hundreds of yearly killings eventually makes the news – more than one each day – some of us flare up in anger and tears. Some ask, ten years after Andries Tatane, nine years after Marikana, has anything changed? This is the wrong question to ask, because it assumes that we should expect anything to be different. The transition from apartheid to neoliberalism was endorsed and brokered by corporate capital, allowing capitalists to make their profits but lose their stigma. Apartheid lives on anew, now palatable to global liberalism, and we can see that in policing.

Instead we should ask, is policing as a whole any good?

What are police?The story of the police is that they are heroes who protect and serve. The fastest way to end that fabrication is to ask what and who exactly they protect and serve in practice, and who in turn is bullied and brutalised.

Everywhere, overall, the police protect the current order. From their creation during colonisation to now, police have served the wealthy against the many, and the white against the rest. In the US, we have seen large-scale mass resistance and outrage against police violence, and yet the situation here is much worse. The lowest independent estimate I have found claims SAPS kills almost two and a half times more people than US police. You know someone who has been raped by them. Ask any land, housing, or mining activist about their experiences with police, and you will start to see a horrid reality that we all must see always. Despite this, as anti-capitalists our programmes generally do not include principled resistance to policing.

What do police protect?Like the wall of a dam, police are the physical force preventing the redistribution of resources of this land to the people. It is police who demolish homes and evict poor masses from stolen land when occupiers try to unsteal it. It is police who, just by doing their job, support the bosses when overstretched workers demand a decent life, dooming workers’ children to that same poverty.

Policing does not solve the issue of crime. More than anything, it is part of the mechanisms that create crime, by

maintaining the private property relations that uphold our unequal society, and enforcing the everyday criminalisation of poor people trying to improve their lives. The harms of policing are not aberrations from the norm. They are what policing is and has always been, because of its systemic function. And therefore it is unfixable. Prisons, too, are a harmful, abject failure, but that is for another article.

Marikana should never have happened because if this were not a colonial nation no miner would have to strike for a measly R12,500. The human reality is that nobody with a full stomach and a roof over their head for themselves and their loved ones would ever go down

into those mines. Those mines are built on extreme exploitation, and while they live, so does colonialism. Among other things it is police, standing there, holding it together.

Reformism is counterproductiveMy brief experience in reformist circles is one of people doing earnest work, but with an underlying anxiety. They notice that their solutions are indefinitely postponed. Their actions provide only token prosecutions, minimal reforms, and other half-measures. They may at best give

the appearance of change, and occasionally do something about the worst abuses. But in practice, these changes all just amount to the minimum needed so that the whole machinery of the state and capitalism can continue to lubricate its gears with the blood of the marginalised.

At the end of apartheid there were reforms that came at great financial cost – the police were demilitarised, retrained and democratised to a significant extent. But all it took was one or two authoritarians in powerful positions to unmake that progress.

Referring again to Marikana, we have seen commissions and panels of experts deliberating and making official recommendations, and then engaging police on those

recommendations up until today, nine years later. Hundreds of

recommendations that will go nowhere – they are as likely as real redistribution of resources under capitalism, because they are part of the same problem.

Reformists do not take into account the overwhelming depth and cost of the changes they want. For people that our society values so little it will not provide them R12,500.

Police accountability mechanisms are counterproductiveOur police accountability agency, the Independent Police Investigative Directorate, has been shown repeatedly

Policing the colony: a police abolition primer for this landBy Caroline Velli

From their creation during colonisation to now, police have served the wealthy against the many, and the white against the rest.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 28

ANALYSIS

by journalist group Viewfinder to be systemically useless. It is largely ignored by the police themselves when it does make findings against police. Like all purely reformist approaches, in practice this agency only uses up and diverts people’s energy and hope for change in a dead end that they have no real say in. This gives some the false impression that there is

police accountability. How many years has it been since Marikana, captured on video, and has a single one of those murderers and those who gave the orders been held accountable? Even less so for less famous cases.

So it is reformism rather than abolition that is really unrealistic or “utopian”.

Concrete steps: take their power, build ours.The twin harms of law and police: let’s decriminalise and defund. Instead of reformist reforms intended to capacitate police, we can limit advocacy to radical reforms, which reduce their capacity to harm. Defunding is not just the removing of police funding, it is the diverting of funding from policing to actual social goods like housing, food security, healthcare and education. These can help everyone, and avoid the reproduction of the conditions that make people feel we need police. Together with that, start with decriminalisation of poverty generally, and the removal of the harmful socio-economic effect of related

harassment, fines, and imprisonment of the marginalised. In this way, we can begin the path to changing completely the way that we relate to accountability. The African Commission for Human and People’s Rights has already adopted principles towards decriminalising petty offences - you and your organisations can go beyond.

Delegitimise: police are not on the side of workers or the marginalised.

Police are “workers” who have chosen to base their livelihoods on the current order. Their jobs depend on defending capital and the ways of thinking that reproduce capitalism, so policing will tend to attract people who are willing to do that. Needing a salary is no excuse for evicting poor families, shooting rubber bullets at hungry students who seek a better life for all, or abusing undocumented migrants. As long as they do their job, they cannot be our allies. Police unions in practice tend to defend some of the worst cops and abuses, while pushing for more money and less accountability. It is for us to denounce the whole institution of police, reject their unions, and demoralise individual officers so that they can leave the force and find themselves on the side of liberation.

Not only for our sakes. If South African police are anything like their siblings overseas, compared to other sectors they have high rates of child abuse and domestic violence, and are more likely to commit suicide or suffer from addiction.

Strong communities make police obsoleteUnlike other places, there has not yet been a comprehensive blueprint built for an abolitionist programme, but we do have precedents. My generation hears some of our elders tell stories of how, during apartheid, regular people organised to

push police out of the townships. Many people formed street committees and community groups and student councils to do the work of arranging community safety without police. We can draw from that history – now lost on much of the youth – and improve upon it, as one essential part of our broader anti-capitalist struggle.

Once we recognise that relations of policing

are part of the society we wish to change, we must ourselves avoid becoming like police or prison guards. Instead, we must foster organised and strong communities which can deal with their own problems in a human way. The power we hold in our communities and movements cannot be taken away simply when officials are corrupt, laws are changed, or state budgets are cut.

We cannot say exactly what this process would look like in our most unequal society yet. But we can learn from the past, and we can learn from abolitionists across the globe. It is for us to explore what is possible and make it together.

Caroline Velli is an abolitionist work-ing in the Anti-Repression Group of the C19 People’s Coalition.

Marikana should never have happened because if this were not a colonial nation no miner would have to strike for a measly R12,500.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 29

ANALYSIS

PPROACHING LOCAL ELECTIONS,beyond its spectacles of defiance and never-ending episodes of controversy, what do the

politics of the Economic Freedom Fighters have to offer?

Reading the party’s 2019 election manifesto and watching their online lecture series, one sees a party that offers Pan-African socialism. The thought of Frantz Fanon has converged with Marxist Leninism to supposedly deliver a

revolution deferred 27 years ago. But post-apartheid politicians are

infamous for talking left and walking in every other direction. Has the EFF’s professed commitment to socialism remained steadfast? Have their radical ideals been made tangible in the actions of the party throughout its brief history?

An overview of the EFF, in the past and present, reveals a party bloated by ideological ambiguity and contradiction. Lacking an ideological anchor, they often misdiagnose the source of the country’s major crisis, offering antiquated solutions while also undermining their ability to achieve their stated objectives.

Electoral populistsSo how is the party of Julius Malema to be understood?

They can be classified as electoral populists. Populism can be seen as a style of politics and set of strategies used to amass power. Because the party is entangled in ideological disorder, issues of race are dangerously misunderstood and exploited for electoral gains or trivial wars of identity. The project of kindling

class consciousness and building working class power, from the bottom up, is cast aside. And once again citizens are left yearning for radical change through a political party that cannot deliver it. “In South Africa we are still to deal with class divisions. At the core of our divisions is racism”, Malema has stated.

Populists, on both the right and left, often portray the struggle for political power as one erupting between corrupt elites and oppressed masses. For the EFF, the great divide is between a wealthy white minority and the destitute black masses, whose oppression and exploitation both produce and sustain white economic domination.

Race but no class analysisRacial inequality is the central factor which fuels the EFF’s programme. This presents a problem not only for the EFF but for anyone seeking to diagnose the source of our society’s major ills. No one awake to South Africa’s reality can reasonably deny the disastrous impacts of systemic racism. But racism, as an explanation for all social and economic issues, only takes us so far when trying

to understand the nature of oppression.Racism is a fluent and visceral

expression of class domination under capitalism. The mass poverty, unemployment and exploitation long endured by black South Africans is a result of capitalism’s imperatives. These imperatives exclude most from accessing the means for producing wealth, by exalting the right to private property to be used for making and hoarding profits. Those locked out of such access become an underclass which must work in life-draining servitude for pitiful wages.

Race as we understand it today was a myth, refined over centuries, to justify

The EFF will not bring the change South Africans needBy Andile Zulu

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 30

ANALYSIS

EFF attack Pravin Gordhan in parliament. Because the party is entangled in ideological disorder, issues of race are dangerously misunderstood and exploited for electoral gains or trivial wars of identity.

capitalism’s class divisions. Those branded as inferior or barely human can be treated as expendable tools to amass wealth for the comfort and domination of a “superior” minority. Colonial conquerors and the Apartheid regime used the myth of racial identities, to legitmise their conquest and accumulation. Because revolution was deferred in 1994, primarily due to the interests of global and local capital, the exploitative structure of Apartheid’s economy largely persists into our present.

The EFF’s obsession with racial divisions is misleading. The reclaiming of white wealth will not lead to black liberation. Moreover, the rhetoric of anti-racism can be co-opted by black people hoping to change the racial composition of inequality but not inequality itself. And such ambitions are often expressed as a desire to rid our economy of white supremacy.

But if relations of class domination and exploitation persist, so will destitution for most black people. Remember that a small black elite has found success in the post-Apartheid era. But those black faces in high places have no interest in advancing liberation. Their class positions - as corporate managers, career politicians and successful tenderpreneurs - compel them to pursue self-enrichment. And importantly, to keep intact an economic order which keeps the working class exactly where they are.

Statist not socialistThe EFF has offered stirring critiques of capitalism. But the future they offer is not socialist. It is not of an economy democratically run by workers or a society held together by communal ownership and collective decision making, where all contribute and benefit in accordance with their needs and abilities. Rather the party proposes an economy partly managed by the state “on behalf” of citizens, with some sectors still under the reigns of private interests.

Can this top-down, state-led approach to transforming the economy be trusted? In other words, is the party of Julius Malema truly fighting for the working class?

No democracyA concerning and constant criticism of the EFF is the absence of a democratic culture within the party. Old and current members have revealed how the organisation shuts down criticism or constructive dissent, preferring loyalty to the thinking of the executive leadership. One also can’t overlook the intense adoration for commander-

in-chief Julius Malema within the party. This adoration can be fierce to the point where members defend some of Malema’s disturbing remarks or harass those (particularly journalists) who criticise their leader.

This lack of a democratic culture is another reason for its ideological confusion. Stifling criticism and centering a party around its top brass of leadership limits the capacity for new ideas or new strategies for advancing its objectives. This erases the possibility of moving beyond its contradictions. Potentially, it can produce a leadership that evades accountability while treating its members as instruments for its political ambitions.

It’s hard to imagine that a party presently hostile to a democratic culture could suddenly embrace it once in executive power or be democratic in its management of the state and national resources.

Need for working class movementIt is the working class which actually produces society’s wealth. If it becomes aware of its status and is mobilised, it can threaten the power of capital using its immense leverage. Historically this has made it a pivotal force for radical change. Although the EFF is not totally distanced from the working class (many of its members are poor and working class), its relationship is not one of steadfast solidarity. The party’s engagement with this grouping is largely opportunistic, sporadic and guided by authoritarian impulses. Therefore the party is unlikely to pose a significant threat to capital’s political power or economic might.

Grassroots movements across the

country, such as the Amadiba Crisis Committee and Abahlali baseMjondolo, have courageously fought and won valuable victories over mass evictions, labour disputes, municipal corruption, xenophobia and food security. The EFF’s interaction with these progressive agents has been lackluster at best. It has often been absent in the struggles of rural women against

mining industries or in the fights of the poor against violent evictions. Some grassroot movements have even condemned the EFF as opportunists, rejecting the party with fierce contempt.

No close ties or tangible solidarity exist between the EFF and the country’s various unions. The Workers and Socialist Party has previously

criticised the red berets for attempts to take over the union, alongside attempts by the EFF to silence and dismiss criticism during internal leadership meetings.

If the EFF were seriously pursuing socialism, they would understand that it cannot be won through the ballot box alone. Outside government, there exist zones of power - within the media, the state, the education system and of course the private sector - that function to maintain the supremacy of capital alongside the political order which sustains it. To combat these concentrations of power, a working class movement is needed to consistently exert pressure for radical change and challenge dominant ideologies, alongside combating the inevitable state violence that will result from such mass mobilisation.

Without such a sustained movement, any radical party will not be able to defend itself against an onslaught of opposition from those eager to preserve the status quo. Almost a decade since its creation, the EFF is not firmly rooted in the working class, therefore undermining its own proclaimed goals.

The EFF is neither fascist nor legitimately leftist. Devoid of ideological clarity, mostly disengaged from the working class and reluctant to embrace democracy from within the party, it is bound to a populism that can invite great attention and perhaps gain it some electoral advances. But ultimately, the EFFV will not be an avenue for radical change.

Andile Zulu is a political writer residing in Durban. He can be found on twitter @Shakas_Coconut.

The Soweto Wine Festival. A small black elite has found success in the post-Apartheid era. But those black faces in high places have no interest in advancing liberation.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 31

ANALYSIS

HERE MUST BE GREATERgovernment intervention in the economy, and public services have to be restored. These have

been two of the primary lessons that many have drawn following the world-changing outbreak of Covid-19. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has changed its tune. And it was one of the main culprits behind the policies leading to the erosion of the public services globally. For example, the IMFs Fiscal Monitor Report, April 2021, points out that: “The Covid-19 pandemic has focused attention on governments and their ability to respond to the crisis.”

The pandemic has laid bare the damaging impact of the hollowing out of the public sector, after almost four decades of an increasingly financialised, deregulated and commodified global economy.

So, there is widespread acknowledgement that restoring the public sector needs to play a central role in advancing a just recovery from the pandemic. In spite of the millions of lives lost over the last year and a half, this is a small silver lining.

And restoring public services is potentially even more fundamental to giving the world the best possible chance of averting an ecological catastrophe.

Unfortunately, this widespread acknowledgement has not translated into a break from “normal” practice. And that normal has contributed significantly to the creation and spread of the pandemic, as well as the lack of capacity to effectively respond to it. Similarly, it has contributed to the destruction of the planet and the ensuing ecological crisis.

Neoliberal austerity rises again from the pandemicAmidst discussions about how the economy should be restructured post-Covid-19, we are already seeing the consolidation of a neoliberal macroeconomic framework in large parts of the world – particularly in developing countries. In other words, going back to the old normal, but this time more intense than before. A recent report, Global Austerity Alert, indicates that, in 2021, 154 countries will implement major budget cuts. And that’s a trend that continues at least until 2025.

Some underlying principles of this neoliberal framework include:1. Austerity budgets: reduction in the

level of public spending on social services and the shrinking of the public sector wage bill;

2. Perpetuation of an export-oriented growth path driven by the extraction of minerals and commercial agriculture. This is enabled by greater levels of

trade liberalisation and the further deregulation of financial markets; and

3. Creation of an enabling environment for greater private sector involvement in the economy. This includes the roll-out of public-private partnerships and the increased privatisation of essential services. According to the Global Austerity

Alert, cuts to the wage bill feature in 61 developing countries. That makes it one of the more common features of the current version of neoliberal austerity measures.

South African austerityIn South Africa, we will see a reduction of more than nine percent in real terms in the public sector wage bill over the next three years.

In the Treasury Director General’s Foreword to the 2020 Budget Review, he acknowledges the adverse impacts that these cuts will have: “Public-service employees should be fairly remunerated, but government is obligated to balance its wage bill with the broader needs of society. Reductions of this magnitude will inevitably have negative consequences for the economy and social services. But these short-term costs are necessary to put the country onto a more sustainable footing.”

However, the European Network on Debt and Development (EURODAD) disagrees. Its report Arrested Development

Saving the public sector is critical for a just recovery By Dominic Brown

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ANALYSIS

In reality, the struggles of the masses of unemployed dependent on public services, and the struggles of the public servants responsible for delivering those services, are closely intertwined.

– International Monetary Fund lending and austerity post covid-19 finds that the impact of the reduction in the wage bill will have much longer-term adverse effects: “As part of IMF financing, public workers in countries such as Costa Rica, South Africa and Tunisia can expect extensive layoffs and reductions of their wages over the coming years. Large reductions in the public sector workforce will further erode the coverage and quality of public services…this will cause long-term harm to local populations.”

This country can ill afford to reduce the numbers of its public servants. With just over 1,300,000 public servants, the size of the public sector has hardly grown since 1995 when the number was 1,269,000. Meanwhile the population has increased. Treasury itself expects that the effect of real wage cuts and other measures will lead to staff leaving public service. Already the size of the public sector as a percentage of the population is only just over 2 percent. That’s just under half the average in Africa and more than three times less than the average in middle-income countries.

In the health sector, a 2020 report by the National Department of Health advises that 96,586 additional health workers will be needed at an additional cost of nearly R40 billion (to the wage bill) to bring the lowest ranked provinces up to the current equity level of the third-ranked province by 2025. Yet we see the wage bill over this period slashed. Based on 2018 figures, health care and education comprise 60 percent of the public service work force. The contradiction cannot be more in your face than this. It should be a bitter pill to swallow for public sector health workers and teachers and the majority of South Africans dependent on public services.

Inequalities in Public SectorMajor inequalities persist in the public sector. There are 17 grade levels. The bottom 5 grades (0 to 5) make up 44 percent of workers, yet they only receive 18.2 percent of the total wage bill. Conversely, the top 5 grades (12 to 17) make up 2.7 percent of workers but receive more than 11 percent

of the wage bill. These 37,500 workers earn between R87,000 and R157,000 per month.

Curbing the top levels of the public sector wage bill is important. But this should be coupled with expanding the workforce as a whole. Especially considering the massive levels of unemployment and the lack of essential services provided to the majority of the population.

The size of the wage billThis may of course lead to an increase in the wage bill. There are many potential pools of revenue that government can look to in order to finance a bigger wage bill that forms part of a broader redistributive economic policy. The appropriate size for the wage bill should be determined in the end by how many people are required to effectively deliver and provide the essential services needed by the population.

Then there are different ways of measuring the wage bill. One way is to look at the wage bill as a percentage of revenues raised (taxes); another way is as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP). Both revenue collection and GDP have been stagnating and / or falling in real terms for various reasons. That means that, even if the wage bill remained constant, the ratio to tax and GDP will increase. But this tells us very little about actual spending on the wage bill.

Another way to measure is to assess how much is being spent on wages as a percentage of total government expenditure. By this metric, wages remain relatively constant as a share of total consolidated expenditure after the introduction of Occupation Specific Dispensation (a salary structure based on occupation introduced in 2007). It hovers around 35 percent.

Treasury’s strategyIt is from this time that Treasury first re-introduced policies aimed at curbing the growth in government spending. From 2012, we see the establishment of the main budget expenditure ceiling. This started a process of restraining spending on investment in infrastructure and social services. This contradictory process embarked on by Treasury has crowded out government spending on other aspects of social services, and not the “rising” wage bill. Michael Sachs (former Deputy Director General in the Treasury’s Budget Office) refers to this as “austerity without fiscal consolidation”.

Treasury and big business are disingenuous when they present spending on essential services and spending on the wage bill as mutually exclusive. It is public servants who are responsible for the

provision of those essential services. It is also misleading to argue that government is unable to spend enough on infrastructure and social investment because of high increases to public servants. Even if government’s tactic is underhanded, it is understandable from a cynical perspective. But in reality,

the struggles of the masses of unemployed dependent on public services and the struggles of the public servants responsible for delivering those services are closely intertwined. Dividing the two into opposing camps serves the interest of the rich (including government officials).

On the other hand, an alliance between the unemployed and public sector unions could be the basis of a campaign to reclaim and expand the public service sector. This will necessitate putting an end to austerity, which is dominated by the cuts to the public sector wage bill. In this way, it’s clear: saving the public sector wage bill is not just about workers’ wages; it’s about a just recovery for the majority of South Africans.

Dominic Brown coordinates the Economic Justice Programme at AIDC.

The bottom 5 grades (0 to 5) make up 44 percent of workers, yet they only receive 18.2 percent of the total wage bill. Conversely, the top 5 grades (12 to 17) make-up 2.7 percent of workers but receive more than 11 percent of the wage bill. These 37,500 workers earn between R87,000 and R157,000 per month.

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Translated from the French version in l’Anticapitaliste. Full version in French and Arabic on Assafirarabi.com

ince the Great Strike of 1936, Palestine has not experienced a collective action by its people as vast and as strong as that which is

now taking place. In all previous militant

stages, the action was confined to one or more specific regions, supported by the rest of the Palestinians. Today Palestine has risen with all its population towards a new stage whose paths are cleared by the people on the ground, these young people who, day and night, are in the streets of Lod, the tunnels of Gaza, the squares of Haifa or the mountains of Jenin.

“This war is different”Gaza, that open-air prison, once again saw its skies ablaze with missiles and the coloniser’s anger. Since the guns fell silent, 55 days after the start of the 2014 clashes, the war has not stopped in Gaza, it has instead taken another form: blockade, negotiations on reconstruction and starvation of the inhabitants, orchestrated by Israel with the complicity of regional regimes and the so-called international community. For its part, the resistance in Gaza, with all its factions, continued to strengthen its capacities. Israel has repeatedly threatened an

operation against Gaza, and the resistance has asserted its readiness to confront this threat. No one was unaware that the battle for Gaza was inevitably to come. The only unknown in the equation was the context and the timing.

“This war is different”: a phrase you hear among Gazans with every war

and every escalation. But this battle is genuinely different, whether in the unprecedented unanimity in supporting the resistance, or in its evolving capacities, or because of the feeling that Gaza is no longer alone. It is also different because of the enormity of the destruction that the colonial state’s missiles inflicted on humans and buildings.

Gaza was not aloneBecause with the acceleration of the course of events in Jerusalem and the call of some inhabitants of the city for Gaza to enter the front line, the people of Gaza have not hesitated in turn to put pressure on the leaders of the resistance factions. They have demanded support for Jerusalem, despite their full awareness of the risk of killings and devastation that this could entail for them. This is why the few voices that criticised the rocket strikes at the start of the clash remained marginal, since most of them came from outside the besieged Gaza Strip. And they quickly

fell silent because of the unprecedented broad popular support for the action of the resistance.

It’s certain that the military and political leaders of the resistance factions heeded these demands. But the most decisive factor remained the resistance’s conviction that this was the most

appropriate time for a confrontation that would come sooner or later. With the launch of the first round of rockets by the resistance, the settlers fled from around the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestinian cheers echoed across the country.

For more than a decade, the inhabitants of Gaza have become accustomed, during wars and waves of escalation, to bearing the brunt of the battles on their own. Meanwhile, in the rest of Palestine, the question was confined to demonstrations of support in the West Bank (when the Palestinian Authority allowed this). And the same was true in the occupied interior (within the limits of Israeli goodwill). The great surprise of this clash is that Gaza was not left alone to the murderous Israeli machine. This was despite the repression by the Authority in Ramallah of any solidarity action and any attempt to defy the colonial state from the areas of the West Bank it controls.

The inhabitants of all the towns and villages of Palestine came out, from Jaffa

Uprising in Lod. The inhabitants of all the towns and villages of Palestine came out, from Jaffa and Haifa to the Triangle [of Galilee], to Al-Jalil and Al-Naqab. The city of Lod has become the icon of the most violent clash.

A turning point in the Palestinian struggleBy Wissam Al Haj

INTERNATIONAL

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and Haifa to the Triangle [of Galilee], to Al-Jalil and Al-Naqab. The city of Lod has become the icon of the most violent clash, thus belying the legend of “the specificity of the situation inside the Green Line”. All of this revived Palestinians’ ability to dream and their full readiness to rise up to continue the battle for freedom.

Palestinians surprise themselvesThis shook Israel and was a traumatic wake-up call for its people. The army and intelligence services considered Gaza as a secondary front which could simply be placed under siege. Meanwhile they could buy the silence of the resistance by allowing the passage of some goods and aid, which allows people to survive, nothing more. As for the other front, the enemy believed they had already settled the business and had moved it away from the heart of the conflict, since the Nakba of 1948.

But Tel Aviv, once far away from the battlefields, has received a deluge of rockets, and the Palestinian masses are now revolting in the very heart of the main cities of the colonial state. There is no longer a safe place in Israel. And it gave a great moral boost to the people in Gaza, who began to closely follow all the information and images of what is happening in the towns and villages, from

which they had been driven. Better still, for many of them, talking about return or release now seems a question that can be discussed rationally and no longer a dream that is difficult to achieve. This is how the Palestinians have surprised themselves, as if discovering an extraordinary strength enabling them to overcome all the shackles of the dream.

It is n this sense that the Gazan activist, Awssaj, wrote on his twitter account: “The best thing will be that after these days, when you talk about the liberation of Palestine, you will be taken for an optimist, but never again for a dreamer, or even for a madman”. For his part, Rafat Abu Aish tweeted from Bir Essabâa: “Even if the liberation does not take place today, it is enough that everyone has realized that it is possible!”.

After things deteriorated and the field of conflict widened, the people of Gaza felt that this battle was different. But the bombing and destruction were

also different. Through intensive night, aerial and artillery bombardments, the occupation intentionally targets the various areas of the Gaza Strip. And as usual, the daily routine of Gaza unfolds in the rhythm of raids, rocket explosions at different times, 24-hour air and ground strikes, aimed at a car here, a house there, then a dose of Palestinian missiles in the evening, followed by an avalanche of

terror falling from the sky, which begins at midnight and ends in the early morning.

This time Israel resumed where it stopped the previous wave in 2014. That is to say that it intentionally destroyed apartment buildings in the vital centres of Gaza City, without sparing the main crossroads and other infrastructure. It has also continuously bombed residential areas near the borders (and all of Gaza is close to the borders!). As always Israel has tested, this time too, new types of “smart” bombs to crush thick concrete fortifications. What can we say then when a huge ball of flames falls on the residential areas, followed by a tremor like that of a devastating earthquake, terrifying the most seasoned people to life under the bombs.

People do not pretend to be heroic; they are not supermen. But each of them seeks in his own way, to defeat the war day by day. Some make jokes and ironical comments, others write their stories on social media. … Only the wounds remain

too deep for people to bear them in one stroke. As a mother, Umm Ahmad, remarked: “The most important thing is that when their missiles fall on us, we forget them as soon as ours are thrown at them. They have been killing us for free since we were born, and today we have the right to respond doubly…”

No one yet knows how this round of the conflict will end. What is certain, however, is that it has broken all the political ceilings created by the various Palestinian political parties, which must also rethink their actions in the light of this event or disappear. Likewise, the impact of this round on the conscience of the Palestinians will remain engraved as a turning point in the history of their struggle. And despite the great pain and deep wounds, the

people, with Gaza’s usual stubbornness, refuse to be victims. They prefer to be the spark that ignites the flame.

Wissam Al Haj is a Gazan journalist currently living in France

This time Israel resumed where it stopped the previous wave in 2014. That is to say that it intentionally destroyed apartment buildings in the vital centres of Gaza City, without sparing the main crossroads and other infrastructure.

INTERNATIONAL

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HE DISCOVERY OF THE SECONDlargest gas field in Africa in 2010 dazzled the Mozambican elite and foreign businesses, who

dreamed of Eldorado, of Qatar in southern Africa. A decade later the gas dream is a nightmare, killed by greed, civil war, and the climate emergency.

Some have become wealthy, and, as always, the poor have been made poorer. Mozambique has become a “resource curse” state. But the poor in coastal Cabo

Delgado did not accept, and they launched a civil war in which the insurgents now control five districts. The war has stopped most work on the gas, and recognition of the climate emergency means it may never restart.

Western countries and their institutions like the IMF have been building this resource curse for 45 years. Frelimo won the independence war against colonial power Portugal in 1974 and set up a “socialist”, multi-racial state. Tiny but successful Mozambique was seen as a threat to both the US and apartheid South Africa. In 1981 the new US President Ronald Reagan intensified the Cold War and launched proxy wars, using the apartheid state to attack Mozambique.

The proxy war stopped with the end of the Cold War, but 1 million Mozambicans had died and there was massive destruction. The IMF, World Bank, and victorious West came to help rebuild, but

subject to victor’s conditions. Mozambique was the only country in Africa where the West imposed the “shock therapy” which had been forced on former countries of the USSR. The idea was to rapidly transform “socialist” nations into neoliberal, free market, capitalist countries, and to quickly convert the old “communist” elite into a new capitalist elite. “Greed is good” was the motto. As in eastern Europe and central Asia, this created oligarchs and corruption. But they were also a comprador elite who

would serve the interests of global capital. In Mozambique, party, state and

business merged, and evolved into a patron-client system. At each level people were expected to serve their patron - even ministers received mobile telephone calls saying give land to X or solve this problem for Y. But each person in the chain could profit from their post. It became known as “cabritismo”- “goatism” - from the saying that “a goat eats where it is tethered.” At the lowest levels, police set up check points to collect money from motorists, and teachers demanded bribes for school places or passing grades.

Wealth though extractionExtraction started early. Using Cahora Bassa electricity to smelt aluminium in 1998 was first, followed by gas from Inhambane piped to South Africa in 2004. This was quickly followed by huge coal mines in Tete in 2007 and the largest

ruby mine in the world in Cabo Delgado in 2011. The second largest natural gas field in Africa was found offshore of Cabo Delgado in 2010. Thousands of people were pushed off their land, losing homes and livelihoods. There were few local jobs, and “local” contracts went to the Frelimo elite in Maputo.

Meanwhile the oligarchs became wealthy and more powerful. But this is a comprador elite, dependent on its links with global capital. Armando Guebuza used

his position as transport minister to gain contracts. By the time he was elected President in 2004, he was reputedly the wealthiest person in Mozambique.

Cabo Delgado became the boom province with rubies, graphite, other minerals and now a gas bonanza. The independence war started in Cabo Delgado in 1964. Two leaders in the independence war are both 83 years old and on Frelimo’s ruling Political Commission and are now oligarchs: Alberto Chipande is the most powerful person in

Cabo Delgado, while Raimundo Pachinuapa owns one-quarter of the ruby mine.

The gas EldoradoBut now gas was going to create Eldorado, with income to Mozambique of $95 bn over 25 years. Gas would be turned into liquefied natural gas (LNG) by huge and expensive machines - investment would exceed $100 billion, making it the largest project in Africa. LNG production was to start in 2019. By 2015 there was a flood of foreign technicians and contractors. There were no local jobs, but the oligarchs and their clients profited at all levels, building hotels, hiring vehicles, taking a percentage of everything.

In many ways, Cabo Delgado began to look like southern Italy, with mafia-like families controlling government and commerce, and sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating.

The neoliberal model is designed

The discovery of the second largest gas field in Africa in 2010 dazzled the Mozambican elite and foreign businesses, who dreamed of Eldorado, of Qatar in southern Africa.

Mozambique: the gas dream becomes a nightmareBy Joseph Hanlon

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to minimise the role of government to redistribute wealth toward the 1%. The vast majority of Mozambicans are still peasant famers, using only a hoe and a machete and no machinery, fertilizer or irrigation. The private sector should provide services and end poverty. But the private sector was never interested in peasants. In the past two decades, both poverty and inequality have increased. Mozambique has been in the bottom eight countries in the UNDP Human Development Index for two decades, and is now 181 out if 189.

The gas is off the coast in the northernmost part of Cabo Delgado, near the Tanzania border. This area is forgotten by an elite in the capital Maputo, 2,500 km south, except perhaps when they fly in to visit the tropical islands for holidays. The costal people have been Muslim for 500 years, and historically are part of trading and fishing communities linked to the Swahili coast.

The independence struggle again?In the 1960s the anti-colonial war built on the argument that colonisers were stealing the wealth and independence would bring prosperity and an equitable share. Fifty years later the ruby and gas boom was creating conspicuous wealth in a sea of poverty. In this context, fundamentalist preachers argued that Sharia would bring prosperity and an equitable share of the wealth.

The new war started in the port town of Mocimboa da Praia in 2017, 53 years after the independence war started in Chai, just 70 km south-west of Mocimboa. The same war in the same place for the same

reason. And again the struggle gained recruits. The insurgents now control five districts, including the port city of Mocimboa da Praia itself. The occupation of the gas boom town of Palma forced French oil and gas multinational Total to stop work in April.

The independence struggle was a local insurgency which gained support from the “socialist” states. This new insurgency is still local, totally under local control, but with growing links with Islamic State. Just as Portugal sought support from NATO to fight “communist terrorists”, so the Mozambique government seeks international support to fight “Islamic terrorists”. No one will officially help the oligarchs fight their own peasants, but many are happy to fight the new evil empire.

In March the United States labelled the insurgents as Islamic State and designated them as foreign terrorists. It sees Mozambique as its new base against IS in Africa and now has military trainers in Mozambique. Will the US turn Mozambique into the new Libya or Afghanistan? Portugal has military trainers in Mozambique and South African mercenaries are also part of the war. SADC, the EU, France and Rwanda all want to join the battle to defeat hungry peasants and defend the oligarchs and the interests of multinational gas and construction companies.

Has the gas bubble burst?Total has said it will only return if foreign troops create a security zone. Half of the gas is controlled by ExxonMobil, which says it will only start once Total is back at

work and safe. The promise of production starting in 2019 is now 2026 at best. But will there be a market for the gas?

The gas companies say they are working to control the climate emergency, and all say they are targeting global heating to 2ºC above pre-industrial levels. But there is broad scientific agreement that to prevent catastrophic changes, global heating must be limited to 1.5ºC. The gap may seem small, but the difference is huge - both for the gas market and for drought in South Africa and cyclones in Mozambique.

Two recent very establishment studies, by oil major BP and the OECD’s International Energy Agency, say that at 2ºC there is still a large market for gas, including Mozambique’s. But they both show that to meet the 1.5ºC target, consumption must fall so fast that there is no need for any new gas supplies - the falling market will be met by already producing gas fields. So at 1.5º Cabo Delgado gas has no market; Total and ExxonMobil will not go ahead.

So the worst case scenario is that Mozambique is turned into Afghanistan to produce gas to create worse droughts in South Africa. The best case is that instead of sending troops, the outsiders create tens of thousands of jobs, but the gas is not developed. The war stops and much worse cyclones are avoided.

Joseph Hanlon has been writing about Mozambique since 1978, and is a visiting senior fellow in inter-national development at London School of Economics.

Armed insurgents pose with an Islamic State flag outside a municipal building in Quissanga, Cabo Delgado, in 2020. This new insurgency is still local, totally under local control, but with growing links with Islamic State.

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The society we are in first Any call for a Left party as Comrade Niall Reddy has proposed, or undertaking any organised Left renewal initiative, would be a futile arm-chair exercise if it does not start with a rigorous analysis of the post-1994 social formation in South Africa, and a realistic appraisal of the possibilities.

Critical questions to pose and ponder in such an analysis would include:1. What are the nature, form and

characteristics of post-apartheid capitalism?

2. What are the core elements, drivers, features and dynamics of the post-apartheid accumulation regime?

3. What is the place of unpaid social reproductive labour and women workers in this accumulation regime? What accounts for gender oppression and patriarchy? What is the strategic significance of the position of women in popular struggles and a long-term Left agenda?

4. What post-apartheid social formation has emerged, evolved and taken shape?

5. Race, racism and the national question: what are the social constructs on race? From a socialist standpoint, how has the post-1994 dispensation dealt with racism and the national question? What accounts for the re-racialisation of society and the failure of Mandela’s nation-building project? What is the significance of race and the national question in the struggle for socialism?

6. What shapes the balance of forces (balance of power or correlation of social forces) and what would it take to tilt this in favour of popular forces?

7. What will it take to get to the point where popular forces can realistically pose a real, deep, mass-rooted and sustained challenge to the power of capital and the neoliberal state?

Pondering these questions would crucially

ground a Left party and a broader Left renewal process with social significance and weight, cogent politics, and a real and exciting newness and prospects for sustainable long-term success. This also means an openness to experiment, explore, learn and build a Left project from the particular capitalism that has emerged since the political transition of the early 1990s. Despite brilliant flashes in parts, Reddy’s argument for a Left party is impoverished by a lack of this kind of scientific grounding in the evolving post-1994 society.

This kind of grounding is exemplified by the Movement building in the shadow of Covid-19 paper of the Covid-19 Working Class Campaign (C19WCC). The relevant points from this paper are: 1. Neoliberalism has profoundly

restructured the working class and has led to a significant decline in its organising power and other strategic capacities. Its old and diminishing segment largely remains in bureaucratised and weakened trade unions. It enjoys formal but declining and precarious employment. It was largely defeated in battles against

neoliberalism in the 1990s and has now suffered political death. This is being accelerated and finished off by the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

2. Alongside this decline has emerged and grown a new, large feminised “post-apartheid working class”. This includes the unemployed, casual workers, workers who hustle daily at the side of the road, the “self-employed” and others who are reduced to do anything to eke out a living. These strata form the bedrock of survival and social reproduction of the entire working class

and have been key in many post-apartheid struggles. Militant sections led the resistance to neoliberalism from the mid-1990s, and were defeated and had disintegrated even before the Marikana massacre of August 2012. A section began to re-organise again after Marikana and can be seen in many continuing protests in the country.3. Factory closures, the collapse of whole industries and the impact of this collapse on state revenues will not just lead to a jobs bloodbath. It will also accelerate a significant and profound shift in the primary terrain of working class struggles from the factories to the townships: “Henceforth, factory struggles will become inextricably connected to struggles for survival, livelihoods and political change driven from the townships. This

convergence between these two sections of the working class is the historical and social basis for the resolution of the organisational questions within the working class.”

Indeed, the C19WCC perspectives must still be more widely debated, tested in practice and enriched by also considering urban-rural dimensions, the rural population, the fragile black middle class and the possibilities for reimagining the emancipatory potential of working class livelihoods activity. What the C19WCC perspectives put forward is the kind of necessary social formation analysis

Mass-rooted Left renewal as the foundationBy Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

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What is the place of unpaid social reproductive labour and women workers in this accumulation regime? What accounts for gender oppression and patriarchy?

required to address the organisational questions facing the Left and the broad working class. Without this, Reddy’s call ends up being an abstract scheme. It is largely inspired by external and somewhat inapplicable experiences of inspiring class struggle-based electoral campaigns of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Podemos in Spain.

We must envision and build a hegemonic historic bloc In a Gramscian sense, what the C19WCC is asking the Left to do is to think through the implications of a social formation analysis for building a new historic bloc. This is required to challenge and defeat neoliberalism, whilst also raising the banner of both long-term transformative

change and ultimately the socialist revolution. In other words, what set of social forces (conscious of their context and situation and with the social weight, a minimum programme, political strategy, and an organised fighting capacity) are required to best advance anti-capitalist revolutionary change? Already, the restructuring of the working class, as the C19WCC demonstrates, contributes to how we can reimagine such a new historic bloc conceptually and programmatically.

Also relevant is the need to acknowledge the subjective weaknesses of working class organisation today. Key amongst these is the absence of a widely shared structural/systemic analysis. This must explain the many problems facing the working class and the required strategy to win immediate demands in a manner connected to a vision - long-term transformative change. Meanwhile at the other end, we see the emboldening and entrenchment of conservative and right-wing discourses, ideologies, ways of living and doing in working class communities. This underlines how this moment is one of utter defeat of the Left,

with its thin and fragile web of life. Reddy’s prime social base for

the desired Left party is the formally employed working class active in the weakened trade unions. Reddy’s remedy is the very same Left party he desires which would provide the advanced cadreship to rebuild trade unions. In this regard, Reddy commits three basic errors: 1. He assumes the existence of

progressive political traditions and practices in trade unions. Instead these have actually become so bureaucratised and hollowed out that the more important task is to rebuild them so that they are fit to play their basic primary role. This must take place before taking on the historic task of being key battalions executing the socialist revolution.

2. He does not consider the reduced social and economic weight of trade unions in the light of the neoliberal restructuring of work; and

3. He underestimates the kind of political resources required (which the Left does not currently have) for what will surely be a complex and long task.

Reddy’s other flaw is to centralise state power as the ultimate achievement of a Left agenda and strategy. He does not consider the historical record of the Left and the state. Overwhelmingly it is a record of defeating the goal of socialism, either through reformism or Stalinist degeneration, which has often led to capitalist restoration. He does not demonstrate how a Left party that contests state power in South Africa would avoid these two typical historical trajectories.

Instead of getting stuck in a limiting pro- vs. anti- party debate, the Left has to focus on a wider process of mass-based Left renewal and rebuilding broad working class hegemony. In a Gramscian sense, the broad working class can

become the leading and the dominant class in a new historic bloc of the majority of the working population against capitalism and the bourgeois state. This is about “leading” where, even before occupying and hopefully transforming power, the broad working class becomes the leading class with capacity to even “dominate” its enemies. The working class has to achieve, sustain and deepen society-wide political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural and moral hegemony as a class.

Stepping into the crisis A progressive trajectory, let alone the socialist revolution, is not to be taken for granted. Unlike reactionary discourses, progressive change requires hard, deep,

long and impactful organising work, ideological work and class struggle. In fact, given that the mass of the people do not yet have the power to eject the illegitimate ruling class, there are real possibilities of a Left agenda being overwhelmed and defeated by the re-emboldened reactionary forces. The question for the Left is: how do we rebuild a Left agenda that can gain traction, with the potential to hegemonise and become the common sense of growing sections of popular forces? Reddy’s Left party solution is not a concrete answer to this question.

Stepping into these crises is both a question of orientation and preparation. We have to recognise the openings present in the crises. This moment requires the broad working class to fight like it has never fought before. This fight is going to be messy and difficult for a long time. We are not where we should be. We have what we have. We need to build for what we need. We must work out and put together the building blocks for a new historic bloc. Instead of the silver bullet

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Alongside this decline has emerged and grown a new, large feminised “post-apartheid working class”. This includes the unemployed, casual workers, workers who hustle daily at the side of the road, the “self-employed” and others who are reduced to do anything to eke out a living.

of a Left party, I suggest the following building blocks: 1. Socialist political education; 2. A new common sense; 3. Mobilisational ability and organising

capacity; 4. Organising to win transformative

reforms in the here and now; 5. Anti-systemic alternatives from below.

Socialist political education We need sustained socialist political education to produce the required critical mass of critical and grounded organic intellectuals, organisers, activists and leaders. No movement forward is possible without several such layers dynamically active across a range of political spaces and mass movements. Such a layer is also key in the redirection of popular struggles in a socialist direction.

A new common sense We must build critical consciousness amongst wider layers of popular forces, including through progressive working class media, culture and creativity (with mass input, output, outreach and impact). Also critical is knowledge production from below – poetry, song, activist research, activist writing, etc, whilst also working with a grounded, committed and engaged traditional intelligentsia, who must be more invested away from the ivory towers and in humble contribution to, and disciplined by, the mass rebuilding effort.

Our many crises mean we have openings to challenge dominant narratives. This is what Africanists, Black Consciousness proponents, decolonialists and conservative social forces have done much more successfully than the traditional socialist Left. The Left lacks a popular narrative that connects directly with how people are experiencing the crises. We need to build this narrative for now, for moments when struggles flare up, and for the long term. We must

agitate against logics and discourses that allow people to fall back into conservative narratives based on fear, scarcity and division.

Mobilisational ability and organising capacity (fighting capacity) We need to lay a clear foundation for organisational power, alternative ideas and radical demands. We need to find ways to mobilise the mass of the people into sustained mass action (not just marches and protest, but transformative organising too). Building mass organisations is critical – informed by the structures, dynamics and actual forms of working class existence (beyond traditional formulas and strategies). This is why we need a critical mass of politically trained cadres.

They will be key to inspire, drive and carry the weight of mobilising and organising. We do not have this critical layer. Crucial here are women, students, unemployed youth, rural people, informal workers, employed workers, the fragile middle class, and LGBTQIA people. We need to map and connect with current mass organisations and struggles, and see what this means for a Left strategy. We need to work in democratic ways contributing to a deeper systemic/structural analysis and the need for a long-term strategy for transformative change.

Organising to win transformative reforms in the here and nowDuring moments of deep-seated crises, it can be more possible to advance bold demands for structural reform than it is in normal times. Indeed, as the Amandla! 75 editorial put it: austerity can be defeated. The crises we have can help turn our weakness around. These crises open windows for change, but those windows

don’t stay open forever. Given the rise of conservative forces, do bold radical Left demands even appeal to the reality of millions of people? How do we pose such Left demands in ways that make mass common sense? How do we connect immediate needs to solutions that go beyond what established mechanisms can address? How do we build from fairly widely shared demands around public goods and a social wage, the municipal and service delivery crisis, the collapse of the state, corruption, free education, land redistribution and access to food? How do we turn these from sterile slogans into living mass demands connected to real struggles and real rebuilding? How do we realistically do this when we are so weak? The popular organising around Covid-19 has some sparks of nimble, quick

responses but they have not yet reached the required momentum. How do we build on this going forward?

Anti-systemic alternatives from belowHow do we enable a strategic shift from immediate demands to a broader transformative perspective, connecting local immediate struggles with the long-term agenda for revolutionary change?

There is much scope for inserting an anti-systemic logic in the various forms of popular resistance. Already we see land redistribution from below through mass land occupations to build semi-liberated zones of self-sustainability, popular opposition to mining, food sovereignty struggles (communal gardens, food kitchens, seed banks, seed sharing, agro-ecology and other thrusts), cooperatives (which crucially need to include the taking over of closed factories), burial societies and stokvels, child care, the rolling back of outsourcing and other socio-economic struggles. Much work remains to be done

Trade unions… have actually become so bureaucratised and hollowed out that the more important task is to rebuild them so that they are fit to play their basic primary role.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 40

NEW POLITICS

in harnessing this resistance into a critical mass and momentum oriented towards anti-systemic logics and long-term transformative change.

Critical here is overcoming capitalist disorganisation. The long queues for social grants and at hospitals and taxi ranks, criminality, domestic violence, the lack of access to basic services, the lack of access to data and airtime, the absence of sufficient healthy food for basic nutrition, expensive electricity, overcrowded housing, hunger and other debilitating socio-economic realities make organising difficult. Even the best of activists are disabled by these, and often organising becomes an opportunity for hustling for life. We have not used these conditions to build alternative collective logics of livelihoods and organising. We must devise strategies to do so.

Also critical is building power: in a crisis, huge numbers of people are open to stepping out of their daily routines and getting involved in social change efforts. This is what we are seeing with Community Action Networks, rural struggles, anti-mining struggles, food sovereignty initiatives, etc. Without organisation, many of these people do not stay engaged after the immediate moment of crisis passes.

We need a plan to connect with such mass mobilisations from crisis moments so we can contribute a Left perspective to what happens and harness the individuals who become involved into becoming committed activists for long-term change.

What is required is a coherent perspective, strategy and programme of the long-term, that can deepen organisational, political and geographic depth, sophistication, sustainability, impact, solidarity and unity in action. With such a strategy and programme, there can be real opportunities for the recomposition of a progressive broad mass movement, possibilities for the re-emergence of united workplace and community struggles, and the potential for these to create a political dynamic that can challenge the ANC’s hold over the black working class.

Then the Left party will have a solid foundation None of the above is possible without an organised Left network which is not yet a party. This would be in order to coordinate, share, learn, reflect and take initiatives, and to attract new and younger layers of activists into Left thinking and getting them to shape and drive Left renewal.

The above pillars also seek to build

the strength and development of the self-organisation and fighting capacity of popular forces. Out of such can emerge the forces that can really own and drive the historic project of building a Left party. Also important is the question of envisaging the process towards discussing a Left party initiative. What? Who? How? When? Important here is to go beyond party mania and really connect a party process to the tempo of mass struggles. Ultimately this is about the political consciousness of popular forces.

Also it would be critical to respect and promote ideological openness, where we reflect, unlearn, let go, learn and base approaches on the searchlight approach – searching for new pathways instead of predetermined blueprints or classical doctrines. Important here is the Left learning from and contributing to feminist politics.

This moment calls us to step into our most visionary and powerful selves, to move mountains to fight for our survival and for a rebuilding on new terms. This is the fight of our lives; it is also the fight for our lives

Mazibuko Jara is part of the Amandla! Editorial Collective

Critical here is overcoming capitalist disorganisation. The long queues for social grants and at hospitals and taxi ranks, criminality, domestic violence, the lack of access to basic services… and other debilitating socio-economic realities make organising difficult.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 41

NEW POLITICS

N EUROPE, WE RECENTLY SAW MASSprotests by the supporters of Liverpool, Manchester United and other English Premiership clubs

against the proposed European Super League. This action sunk the proposed elite Super League and demonstrated the potential power of supporters, which reached all the way to the inaccessible boardrooms controlling European football.

In South Africa, such action is unimaginable. The famous, popular and solidarity-based Iwisa Charity Spectacular tournament was killed by the commercial interests of the once-dominant Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. And there was no action by football supporters. The season-opening tournament had existed for more than 15 years and participation in it was always based on the telephone-based popular vote of at least 2 million football supporters each year. They determined which four teams competed. The entire proceeds were given to “charity”.

Where there was some kind of mass action was a limited march in early May by Chiefs fans to demand better performance. This is an action which Pirates fans threatened to undertake for the same reasons but failed to execute.

Football commodified away from popular control It is the power of money over football that has led to the decade-long domination of the Premier Soccer League by Mamelodi Sundowns. Sundowns have been financed from the mining-based profits and wealth held by the family of Patrice Motsepe, whose mining companies largely pay starvation wages to tens of thousands of mine workers.

This commodification of football can be seen elsewhere too – the capture of TV rights by the Naspers-owned

DSTV, the dependence of professional football on sponsorships by capitalist companies, and the control of football clubs by unelected and unaccountable families and private companies.

As implied above, the reality of commodified and elite-controlled football is taken as given and unchangeable by the majority of football fans. This hegemonic reality is actually in direct contradiction to what had existed as the popular control of football at earlier moments of our history.

My club, Orlando Pirates, was not known as the People’s Club for a trite reason. It was precisely because its supporters attended its meetings in mass and held significant weight in the decisions made about the direction of the club. Earlier, the club even had a more community character when the old Orlando Boys Club, from which Pirates originated, was controlled by a community-elected and women-dominated committee.

The same was the case for Moroka Swallows, the early Sundowns, Witbank Black Aces, the defunct Pimville United Brothers and many others. Importantly, this culture of working class control of a club was not the case with Chiefs, which has always centred around the figure of Kaizer Motaung.

The rolling back of popular control of these clubs was often bloody and

deadly. The presently dominant mafia would not tolerate any opposition to its rising control. It is a great omission that little has been written or recorded in film about this aspect of our football’s history.

The only semblance of football supporter participation is in the Supporters’ Clubs that the leading clubs have. Through country-wide branch networks there is some limited exercise of supporter power and voice at the most basic level. However, there is limited autonomy and ultimate subordination to the Marketing Divisions of the actual Football Club. Supporters still do not have any say, voice or power in the ownership, control and administration of the clubs.

Primitive accumulation by a football mafia The mafia-style control of our football has led to the disaster that the national men’s team has been for more than 15 years now. This failure largely stems from the absence of a broad-based, resourced, dynamic and innovative football development agenda. Instead, the mafia at the helm of our football uses its power to primitively accumulate wealth, which takes away from bottom-up football development.

When the PSL first negotiated TV rights with Supersport in 2007, it

Can we reclaim football from below?By Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara

In Europe, we recently saw mass protests by the supporters of Liverpool, Manchester United and other English Premiership clubs against the proposed European Super League.

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 42

decided to pay a R70 million bonus to a three-person committee (Irvin Khoza, Kaizer Motaung and Mato Madlala) that negotiated the R1.6 billion rand deal. They did this instead of meeting the demand from lower tier clubs to increase the monthly grant from R50,000 to R200,000. This went together with another demand to increase voting powers for these clubs from two to five.

No broad-based development Safa scored a windfall of R685 million for football development from hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup tournament. Fifa transferred this amount into the 2010 Fifa World Cup Legacy Trust which was established by Fifa and Safa to promote and develop football. The most logical thing was to promote grassroots football starting with school football.

Despite this windfall, Safa has never initiated any such grassroots development programme. In many townships and rural villages, school football is not supported at all. There are no coach development programmes, schools do not have budgets for playing equipment, transport costs to games are self-financed by each school, and school sports grounds are poorly developed. Safa has also not publicly accounted for how the Fifa windfall was used. The only reported activity was the R137 million used to build Safa House next to FNB

Stadium. Already by 2014, Safa financial statements confirmed a loss of R55m for that year.

Instead of promoting real bottom-up development, the mafia dangles the false promise of commercialised football as the path to football development. Even university-based clubs are encouraged to secure private sponsorships in the same way it happened with varsity rugby. It is also the same for 2nd-tier and 3rd-tier and lower division clubs which have far smaller resources than the premier division. As a result, many of the newly enriched BEE beneficiaries have sought ownership of these lower tier clubs as a demonstration of their newly arrived status. Some have taken short cuts by buying premier clubs’ statuses. All this perpetuates the domination of the commercial logic over broad-based development.

The underdevelopment of women’s soccer is another symptom of the mafia approach to our football. If women’s football proves to be commercially viable, it is likely that the same mafia will capture it in order to continue with accumulation and not for the development of women’s football.

Seeds for change Despite the limits of the Supporters’ Clubs as discussed above, the seed for change in football actually lies in them.

They can become an important platform and voice in the necessary struggle to democratise football and reclaim it from the elites. This agenda can start with the demand for the return of the Charity Tournament, creating institutional space for the role of supporters in the ownership and control of clubs and the redirecting of resources to lower level football development.

Beyond the clubs, there is much work to do to raise the banner of school football development. This is where teacher trade unions, student organisations and parents need to be better organised around the revival of school sports in general. It is on that basis that they can be an organised voice putting mass pressure on the state, the football establishment and private companies for the redirection of resources away from the mafia into school sports.

These ideas can only become real with much activist effort and the effective organisation of a radical sports transformation agenda in supporters clubs, and in school sports. This would the more sustainable and democratic foundation that can guarantee quality and success of our national teams in the long term.

Mazibuko Jara is part of the Amandla! Editorial Collective.

Safa scored a windfall of R685 million for football development from hosting the 2010 Fifa World Cup tournament… Despite this windfall, Safa has never initiated any grassroots development programme.

NEW POLITICSCULTURE

JUNE 2021Amandla! Issue NO.76 43

COULD NOT HAVE PICKED Abetter spot to immerse myself in a book that tells unique economics stories from experiences, hopes

and aspirations of people. These people are often viewed as numbers, variables in modelling and segments of statistical reports. I’m on a wooden bench, on a patio facing scenic mountains of Amathole (individually named Hoho, Geju, Mbozo and Beke’ umtana) in a village called eSinyannduleni, Lower Rabula Village, in Keiskammahoek, an hour from King Phalo airport in kuGompo (East London). This is after travelling on the N2 from East London to King Williams Town, past Fort Jackson Industrial onto Dimbaza, some kilometers outside King Williams Town, on the R63 that goes all the way to Prieska in the Northern Cape. Places Ayabonga brings to life vividly.

When I picked the book at OR Tambo airport, little did I know that much of what I will read in the first chapter is about the Eastern Cape. Some 20 meters in front of where I was seated is a cattle kraal, and further down are rolling hills with scattered villages and cattle roaming open fields. A picture of an entire untapped economy on the doorstep of many families, with the potential to socially reproduce a different future.

The book is divided into three parts: confronting and overcoming the native reserves, scribbles on money, people and power, and socially reproducing a different future. Parts two and three present various exciting subjects. But part one challenges the economic discipline by reminding us that ultimately economics is about people, lives, hopes and aspirations. Four things that appear to have been overtaken by modelling, statistical data and a finance capital-biased curriculum at institutions of higher learning. The challenge is a phenomenal contribution in political economy literature that activists, researchers and policymakers will do well to bear in mind.

Wittingly, the book traverses intersectional areas of economics, politics, public administration,

sexuality, gender and race in a manner that demonstrates historical continuities and makes practical proposals to reimagine the relationship between consumption, production and accumulation that is human-centric. Many scholars in contemporary political-economic literature tend to overlook continuities that laid the foundation of South Africa’s economy from colonisation, interwar periods, the great depression, apartheid, and the post-apartheid era. These continuities include the deliberate transformation of South Africa’s society through violence, land dispossession and dehumanisation of Africans to create an endless supply of labour through reservation wages – the lowest wages workers will be willing to accept. Ayabonga demonstrates this vividly.

Indeed, the process to produce a different future will need us to reimagine our geographic, social and economic as well as gender, race, and ecological relations that prioritise people’s overall well-being. To do this, Ayabonga, through his book, has demonstrated the need to study rural areas, particularly former homelands. This will involve paying attention to all components that make linkages, flows and backflows in the economy. It will involve locating households, communities, firms, infrastructure and overall value chains to leverage comparative advantages for each of the former homelands.

At the core of the book are nuanced, practical and implementable interventions that will see the discontinuities of migrant labour systems that tend to drive young people to informal settlements in Johannesburg, Cape Town and eThekwini metropoles. Proposed interventions further demonstrate the need to bring to finality the land question.

Equally important is the state’s role in building decentralised infrastructure that links homes, communities and sites of production and consumption in a manner that localises economies. This should

include leveraging state procurement to reinforce a reimagined economy on millions of people’s doorstep.

This poses a serious question to South Africa’s fiscal policy and the division of revenue that allocates state resources across priorities and to different spheres of government in the face of austerities. Unless we move in this direction that repositions local government, we will continue to see gains for capital finance in the metropoles, while millions of people continue to live in hunger in former homelands.

Ayabonga presents a well-argued, cogent and much-needed intervention that balances the role of the state and private sector in the economy. Reimagining a society that will make economies in Comfivaba, Ga-Mphahlele, Nongoma, Giyani and Dimbaza and those in Mazule’s co-operative in Kwa-Bhaca viable, as Ayabonga puts it.

Gumani Tshimomola is Chief Researcher for EFF Parliamentary Caucus and a doctoral student at Wits University

BOOK REVIEW

44

THE ECONOMY ON YOUR DOORSTEPBy Gumani Tshimomola

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I AM AN AFRICANI am born of the peoples of the continent of Africa...The dismal

shame of poverty, suffering and human degradation of my

continent is a blight that we share. The blight on our happiness

that derives from this and from our drift to the periphery of the ordering of human affairs leaves

us in a persistent shadow of despair. Whatever the setbacks

of the moment, nothing can stop us now! Whatever the difficulties, Africa shall be at peace! However improbable it may sound to the

skeptics, Africa will prosper!

- Thabo Mbeki