00:00 Niall Reddy: It's very difficult to claim that the ANC has really done anything substantive in terms of economic transformation for workers. They say, well, there's this terrible apartheid economy that we've been left with, we're still struggling to transform it, but at least we've had these wonderful redistributive steps. And I was actually a little bit surprised — it came out at the same time as there was a World Bank report on South African welfare and things — I was quite surprised that actually, when you look at the macroeconomic statistics, there is a pretty high level of social
00:31 spending in relation to GDP. It actually compares favourably to a lot of these so-called pink tide economies and neo-developmentalist economies in Latin America. And there have been fairly substantial programmes around housing, around electricity, some things around free basic access to water and various things. When you dig into any more detail around these issues you will find that a lot of the time, even where the spending figures might seem something quite progressive in the
01:02 policy, they've been very badly undermined by, firstly, the neoliberal design of the programme that's been implemented, and also just a very poor quality of the actual welfare that's been delivered. Not to say that there haven't been improvements in a lot of areas, but those statistics are always very contested in South Africa, and I think a lot of what you hear from state agencies at least needs to be viewed very critically. The social grants, I mean, absolutely are a
01:35 vital lifeline. When you talk about an economy with 40 per cent unemployment there is an enormous section of the working class that lives directly off the social grants system. So of course it would be an absolute death sentence for a socialist movement to claim for a second that we would try and repeal social grants in any way. And of course it's a slogan of the United Front that we have to — actually, what the agencies are doing now is introducing a kind of
02:05 secret austerity in the grants, by increasing them below inflation. So I think it will be a critical struggle of any kind of united front to say that these grants need to be not only defended but expanded, because they are a lifeline for a huge amount of the population. But they really are a pittance. They don't actually keep anybody at a standard of living much above the poverty line at all, and invariably — again because of these huge dependency networks, because of the huge unemployment rate — they're divided amongst
02:35 sort of ten or twelve people living off a grant that's less than 100 euros a month. To talk a bit about women's struggles — because of course there's still such an appalling situation for women in South Africa, and particularly working-class women, in terms of the level of violence, the levels of everything that's being faced. And you're right to say that so many of the burdens of these struggles around migrancy
03:06 fall on the shoulders of women. Interestingly there has been this transformation in the migrant labour system where before, as you said, the community remained in the rural areas and these migrant workers were working on the mines; now there's a situation where a lot of mineworkers are supporting two families, one that lives on the mines and another that is based in the community. And the women's organisations living in the communities around the mines have been absolutely the vanguard of so many of the struggles that have taken place since everything erupted at
03:36 Marikana — struggles around justice for the mineworkers, but also struggles around all the sorts of community issues that were not taken up by labour movements in the area. In general I would say that's one of the weakest areas. There has actually been pretty substantial levels of local struggle in South Africa — there are some sociologists that say we've had the highest per capita amount of protests in the world — and it's very much concentrated on
04:07 issues of corruption and service delivery. Women's issues, I think, have been an enormous weakness of the left and of progressives within the Alliance and outside. I really hope that initiatives will be strengthened, and I would say there have been positive signs in realising the centrality of these issues by this NUMSA united front process. So, to respond to a few things Terry was bringing up about the connections between these struggles. As I suggested at the beginning, there
04:37 was, in the whole post-apartheid period, a complete divorce of labour from this enormous tide of social protest. This was really the very hard line that was driven by the SACP: to say that any protest action taking place outside of Alliance structures is just some kind of imperialist agency essentially. And NUMSA and others, for all the fact that they definitely represented more of a class struggle component within the Alliance, were essentially faithful to this line. It
05:09 meant that there was this complete disconnect that existed between these two levels of struggle. And I think that that is something for which we can absolutely commend them: that the first steps that they took from the launching of this United Front process was, as a comrade said over here, the launching of conventions and indabas, where they invited people representing all sorts of social struggles across different layers of society to come and present, and to say that this United Front is really
05:39 going to be finally about connecting these different struggles together. That said, there is — as I was alluding to — a lot of more concrete work to be done, to go beyond this verbal aspiration of unity. The reality is there has been somewhat of a stumbling block in the early process of the United Front: that NUMSA and others, who are very much the bedrock of this process, haven't fully succeeded in overcoming an
06:10 attitude of proletarian centricity — of purely putting labour issues at the heart of everything, and instead of simply saying that you want community struggles to come and join in labour struggles, actually a much deeper process of involving workers in the myriad community and social struggles that have been going on around them. And so the comrade asked about regional links. I must again express this terrible sub-imperialist South African attitude,
06:41 where I'm very unaware, and frankly the left in general is very poor in regional solidarity. I think that's something that needs to be a major focus of an emerging left in the country, to rebuild those links — because we also have to be very aware of South Africa's particular role in southern Africa as a sub-imperial or small imperial power, that relates to its hinterland in the way traditional imperialist powers did: through the export of goods, undermining their industries, promoting South African
07:12 corporations and the South African finance sector to penetrate into these economies, and using them as sources of cheap labour with massive immigration into the country. So I would say it's a critical area of struggle, but I'm not in a position to really comment on the political conjuncture in these regions, or on what's been done so far to develop the links that I think are very important. Before I finish completely I wanted to just mention — because you also asked about the links between the EFF and NUMSA. The EFF was a lot better in the beginning at calling
07:44 out to NUMSA and asking for meetings, and NUMSA so far has refused to meet at all with the EFF. On the one hand there's a sort of sectarian element to it; on the other hand this was a decision that was determined by tactical considerations based on the nature of their struggle in COSATU. As I said, it's a very complicated process of trying to win workers away from very deep-rooted loyalties to the ANC, and it
08:15 is a very sensitive point in a struggle where there is this unevenness in consciousness, where workers are sort of starting to be prepared to say that we need to build something outside of the ANC, but a wide layer of those are still arguing that the ANC will be the only mass organisation, we need to fight inside it. If they went out all of a sudden and started meeting with the EFF, there's a lot of problems with that. I hope as these splits develop and more coherent
08:45 formations begin to form outside, those kinds of linkages can be developed. Certainly I think they're crucially necessary. I'm going to say one or two things about the role of consciously Trotskyist groups. I would say they're very small. Most of the small revolutionary parties would be active in the DLF in some way — that's people like the SWP's group [?] and a few others. The one other that was significant, or significant for a while, outside was the CWI affiliate,
09:18 known as the Democratic Socialist Movement. They had a number of activists that were quite crucial in mining workers' sectors before these strikes ever happened, and so after Marikana they were quite involved initially in running the workers' committees and various things, and they got a lot of media attention. But they ended up completely jumping the gun, essentially — and, as I understand, based on a directive that came from their International that was basically saying that
09:48 we're in this new cycle of proletarian insurgency across the world, now is the point to start forming parties. Completely unreasonably, they went and formed this Workers and Socialist Party, as these splits were in the early phases, and then went out to this NUMSA union of 350,000 workers and said, look, we've formed a vanguard, you need to take your place within the vanguard. And they were absolutely crushed — I mean, they received less than 6,000 votes in the election, and lost whatever base that they had built
10:19 up in the mines before. And frankly I think it's representative of a sort of politics and a sort of tactics that is going to be completely unhelpful at the moment. There are even groups within the DLF that I think have fallen back very much into this sort of imposing of what they believe, or of a kind of revolutionary set of ideas: at any point that they feel that the leadership, or the rank and file within the United Front, is not following the exact right line, they'll [walk out of?] the meeting. And I think it's just totally unhelpful, when what we're doing right now is really trying to manage this very tense and difficult process of the split of the workers' movement from this corporatist Alliance.
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