A fierce debate is raging on the left in South Africa about the launch of what the country's mainstream media has labelled "the new United Democratic Front".
Leaders of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in the Western Cape formally launched the initiative in August at a mass meeting attended by a range of nongovernmental organisations and community groups. It was not formally named but its stated aim is to bring together a wide range of "progressive civil society" forces to campaign for jobs and against poverty.
The original UDF was founded in Cape initiative has Town in 1983, pro- sparked an viding an umbrella for the militant, important mass-based strug- debate among gles against the
left forces in apartheid regime. Who and what the "new UDF" represents is the subject of intense speculation.
It may signal a split within the Tripartite Alliance (the ruling ANC, the South African Communist Party and the unions of COSATU) and a serious challenge to the capitalist ANC. Certainly, at the launch, suggestions from the floor that COSATU break away from the ANC and form an independent workers' party received some of the loudest applause.
While in the lead-up to the launch the new organisation had been refered to internally in COSATU as a "UDF-type initiative" the body's national leaders then denied they were challenging the ANC.
They also attempted to distance themselves from public statements attributed to the COSATU's leader in the Western Cape, Tony Ehrenreich, in which he had pointed to working class and general community dissatisfaction with the neo-liberal policies of the national ANC government.
For some in the social movements, COSATU's halfhearted attempts over the last several years to resist the attacks by the state on working people and oppose ANC "free market policies", are clear evidence that the "new UDF" move is not serious.
Others, though, believe the The "new UDF" social movements
must immediately join the initiative and use the "space to "win over" rank-andfile union members so as to split COSATU from the Tripartite Alliance. This, they argue would then lay the basis for the formation of an independent "mass workers' party".
Whatever its future, the "new UDF" initiative has sparked an important strategic and tactical debate among left forces in South Africa. At a time when the ANC's ideological, political and organisational hegemony is being eroded and there are new opportunities to take forward revolutionary politics and struggle, such a debate is urgent and necessary. • This is an abridged version of an article from Johannesburg by Dale T. McKinley which first appeared in the Austrialian socialist paper Green Left Weekly.