The ninth Congress of COSATU, the South Africa trade union federation which represents almost 2 million members, concluded on September 2l. In a piece written in the run up to the Congress, PETER JACOBS discusses some of the key issues facing delegates.
At this congress, COSATU affiliates will elect a new leadership for the federation. Each affiliate at its own congress has put forward names for key leadership positions -calling on workers to aspirations to what is essentially a bourgeois party. A thorough and genuline examination of its history testifies to this. Building an alternative party based on the short-term and longterm demands of working people thus takes second stage to saving the tripartite alliance guided by a bourgeois platform. 'Defence of the alliance at any cost' seems to be the overriding onentanon In this political discussion paper and it dictates the federation's approach to trade union unity and the new social movements'. take a clearer stand on collaborating with these formations. Across the country, in working class townships and among peasants in villages, resentment runs deep because 12 years after apartheid there has been no meaningful service delivery and agrarian reform.
Out of these spontaneous protests, working class communities and landless peasants started mobilising and organising nemse ves social movements to fight for their demands.
These social movements (Anti-Privatisation Forum, Social Movements Indaba, etc) conduct their struggles outside the fold of the alliance, as at the WSSD 2002, arouno recent local elecuons and ongoing protests for housing, land, electricity,