00:00 Niall Reddy: Thanks to Socialist Resistance for inviting me, and to Norman for that very interesting history from the perspective of the Unity Movement. I want to fast forward now a couple of decades and really talk to the very exciting political developments that have taken place since the crisis in South Africa, and particularly since the massacre of the mineworkers in 2012. I was giving this as a report to the Fourth International's council just a couple of weeks ago in Amsterdam, and I managed to talk for well over an
00:30 hour on these topics — the extent of the realignment and the things that we've seen. So I'm going to try and be a lot more disciplined today and stick to fifteen, twenty minutes. But that will mean, unfortunately, that I'm going to presume that there's a little bit of familiarity and background information on the country; if there's anything left unsaid, hopefully we can clarify at the end of the discussion. I want to focus on three main developments that have occurred. First, the rise of the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is the first sort of left split from the ANC. Then the
01:02 rightward consolidation that we've seen in the ANC in the last couple of years. And then, to end on a slightly hopeful note, I want to talk about the splits in the union movement, with the metalworkers, and the formation of this United Front for Socialism. So just to start with a few words of background on South African post-apartheid political economy and the nature of the crisis. We can think of the post-apartheid period as being characterised by the ongoing domination of the minerals-energy complex, which is a term that comes from
01:32 Ben Fine here at SOAS, which he uses to characterise South African industrialisation as determined and dominated by these major conglomerates rooted in mining, but which also came to dominate the finance sector and wide sections of the South African economy — which, through their links to the state and their linkages with other industries, determined the entire accumulation path in the country. It gave us a very distorted industrial structure rooted in mining, with massive unemployment. And it was really the drive of these sectors to
02:03 financialise and to globalise the South African economy, to participate in the global neoliberal revolution, that the ANC's free market policy was designed to facilitate. You would know that we had this elite transition in South Africa, where the social democratic dream died very quickly and we had this very stringent Washington consensus type of economic policy imposed by the new ANC government. And this was very effective in ensuring massive
02:34 profitability in the South African economy — increasing the rate of exploitation, in Marxist terms. A lot of our statistics suggest that big South African corporations have been amongst the most profitable in the world. We've seen the doubling of the economy-wide profit rate, but this hasn't translated into any real investment in the productive sector. So instead we've had enormous growth of the financial sector in terms of profit and value added, massive diversion of non-financial corporations away from real investment towards speculation and
03:04 financial activities. And then we've had this enormous systemic looting of the country, essentially half through legal repatriation of profit and corporations moving abroad, but also massive illegal capital flight, amounting to 12 per cent of GDP on average in the early 2000s. So you can imagine — a tenth of the value produced in a country moving off its borders illegally. As a result of that the economy has remained concentrated in these traditional minerals-energy complex sectors, and
03:36 there's been a little bit of job creation around more precarious work in retail and service and various other things. But we've had absolutely no dent in the so-called triple crisis in South Africa, which is firstly an unemployment rate that has stagnated around 37 per cent, poverty at around 54 per cent, and a Gini coefficient which is purported to be the largest of any large nation in the world, around 0.66 — so the most unequal large nation on the planet. And
04:06 this has been secured through the emergence of a new hegemonic bloc, which was firstly developed through the ANC's transformation into a kind of state party machine, this real penetration into the South African state; the creation of a tiny black elite through policies of black economic empowerment, which were implemented in place of any kind of substantive nationalisation or redistribution. So this was really mainly done in the mining and the finance sectors, just introducing a small black elite into corporate boardrooms,
04:36 them very linked to the elite that's been created in the state; and this group leading a wider middle class layer mainly based in public sector work and business related to the state. This is the core class bloc that has become hegemonic in the ANC, and that has secured the loyalty and the hegemony of the wider working class really through the role of the Congress of South
05:07 African Trade Unions, COSATU, and the South African Communist Party, and the Tripartite Alliance. But it's important to say that this has been something that's been guaranteed really through the political co-optation and bureaucratisation of the union movement. And I stress this because I think it's very important in understanding the current crisis. A lot of our recent research has been trying to dispel this quite pervasive myth that the trade union movement in South Africa — despite the fact that it has been politically
05:38 defanged through this corporatist alliance with the ANC — that it's been able to lead a very militant shop floor struggle in defence of an insider layer of formal sector workers, that has created a labour aristocracy in the country. That's a [persuasive?] narrative that you hear from capital, from the business press, but also from progressives and from left-wing academics, and it's simply really not true. We've actually seen a complete erosion of the quite powerful traditions of worker democracy and worker control that existed in the union movement in the 80s, the total
06:10 co-optation of unions into the state and into business, and actually very low levels of industrial action and completely stagnant wages for most workers. I can talk a bit about that later. So this was the situation in 2008, when the global crisis struck, and South Africa was amongst the worst affected developing nations. We lost more than a million jobs between the onset of the crisis in 2008 and 2010, and we've only just begun to recover that work. So South African capital was more or
06:42 less entirely effective in passing off the costs of the crisis onto labour, and the initial rebellion against this was suppressed in the first years through basically a project of false consciousness around the soccer World Cup. They managed to pretend this was going to be the panacea, that this would bring all the foreign investment that had been promised, and the unrest was contained. It was left simmering until the unrest began in the mining sector in 2012, and it started at
07:12 another mine, Rustenburg, Impala Platinum, and then spread to Marikana — where most of you would be, I hope, just a little bit familiar with the events that took place: the massacre of 34 mineworkers by the police, and the brutal repression of that. So I'm not going to talk in any detail about the massacre, we can go into that a bit at the end. Just to talk about the significance of it: there's a fantastic quote from Ruth First, a very famous Communist Party journalist in
07:44 South Africa who was killed by a parcel bomb. She was describing the 1946 rebellion of the mineworkers in South Africa, and she called it one of these great historic incidents that "in a flash of illumination educates a nation, reveals what has been hidden, destroys lies and illusions". And Marikana was almost incredible for the way it crystallised all these major contradictions of the post-apartheid period that I just described. The National Union of Mineworkers was probably the most
08:15 co-opted of the South African unions. Its leadership was paid directly by the mines; its shop stewards had been literally brought into the human resources departments of the mining companies. And nothing is more symbolic of all of this than the personal trajectory of that mineworkers' founder, Cyril Ramaphosa — a radical in the 80s, had joined the ANC, headed up its negotiations in the mid 90s as secretary general for a while, and then left and became the second richest and perhaps the most prominent
08:46 black businessman in the country. At the time of the massacre he was the largest shareholder in Lonmin, the British-based mining company that these workers were rebelling against. And as was revealed by the commission of inquiry subsequently, it was his direct influence over the police commissioner and over ANC chiefs in the province that was responsible for directing the police to break the strike in the most brutal manner. He became known as the Butcher of Marikana. So Marikana was so symbolic of this ongoing domination
09:18 of a minerals-energy complex in South Africa, now based on new allegiances with a black elite in the state, whilst workers were living in literally conditions that had been unchanged in 150 years of mining in the country. Its immediate consequence was of course a massive labour rebellion. The National Union of Mineworkers lost all its members in platinum and a lot of other sectors in gold, and there was this incredible strike taken up — workers picking up the spear for the demand of a living wage, and organised in the mining
09:50 sectors by organic workers' committees. They joined at the time a small splinter union known as AMCU, which I can talk about a little bit at the end, but in the actual strike that occurred immediately afterwards this was really run by workers themselves. That strike spread immediately then, quite incredibly, to the farm workers' sector in the Western Cape, which is perhaps the most exploited sector in South Africa, where we have farm workers who are literally living in feudalistic conditions. There is absolutely no
10:21 union representation, no application of the labour laws that exist in the country. And absolutely out of nowhere — there had been literally no struggle from farm workers — again self-organised through organic workers' committees, using WhatsApp and various things to lead this incredible struggle across an entire very dispersed region, blocking roads in order to prevent the transportation of goods and workers to the farms. A brutal response from the police, three people killed, but able to win an increase in
10:51 the minimum wage in the sector of 100 per cent. And the rebellion continued on from here into the manufacturing sector, transport sector, into 2013 during the wage bargaining season, where we saw massive strikes across the economy, and continued again into 2014 — sorry — where by June we saw the end of the longest ever strike in South Africa's mining history: 70,000 platinum workers continuing the struggle for a living wage, and winning
11:21 increases at about twice the inflation rate. So now to talk about some of the political realignments that have taken place on the basis of this. This was firstly the conditions for the rise of what I called earlier the first left split from the ANC: the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, who became famous as the firebrand leader of the ANC Youth League, and was at the time, 2008–2009, a
11:54 critical ally of President Zuma. Himself a guy who's spent his entire life in the ANC. He's a consummate demagogue, an incredible populist, by far and away the best political orator I've seen in the country, an absolute master of the sound bite and of his imagery, and someone with a seemingly powerful intuition for the mass sentiment, and particularly for the mass discontent and anger of the huge
12:26 black unemployed urban youth in South Africa. During this time in the ANC he became the expression of that anger, and eventually for various reasons came into conflict with President Zuma, and was expelled in 2011 I think. And then in 2012, after the massacre, he was literally the first politician on the ground. He'd spent a little bit of time off the scene, in the wilderness; suddenly he re-emerges, he goes to the mineworkers, and he starts this political
12:56 process. A year later, in 2013, the Economic Freedom Fighters are launched at Marikana, based mainly on the more radical elements that came out of the Youth League with him, along with a few of the younger and more radical parts of the Communist Party; and then collecting a whole composite, variegated social layer — a lot of radical community leaders, some of them also Youth League people, people from the black consciousness movement, and also frankly a lot of
13:30 less pleasant elements: people that had been responsible in the townships for leading the horrific bouts of xenophobic violence that we'd seen a couple of years earlier, that killed 70 people and displaced tens of thousands. So he leads this quite incredible political process of forming the Economic Freedom Fighters, again generating a lot of power through his incredible command of the media. Even the name Economic Freedom Fighters was quite a genius device — it was very effective in situating
14:01 them continuing within the Congress tradition, and saying we are now the ones who are actually taking forward the second stage of the revolution that had been continually promised by the Communist Party. And Malema goes from being — when he was in the ANC, when he was in power, in public he was a completely corrupt figure as well as being a radical nationalist. He was involved in all sorts of tender corruption; he's just now got a bill from the revenue services for 18 million rand. But he was
14:32 very effective at this point in this transition in his image, from wearing these purple Versace suits to donning a red beret, which has become the symbol of the Economic Freedom Fighters. The official ideology of the Economic Freedom Fighters is Marxism-Leninism-Fanonism, but depending on who they talk to it's a very subtle rhetoric that changes quite a lot — from a very radical black consciousness type of thing, to now
15:03 more and more consciously a class register, a class grammar, and then occasionally even sort of social democratic if that's the audience he needs to appeal to. But undoubtedly incredibly effective: this new organisation formed with very little money, building in a matter of months to win 1.1 million votes in the election that took place last year. Initially criticised by a lot on the left as being a kind of electoral thing, something that was just about
15:33 reconstituting a support base for this populist character Malema — but it's something actually a lot more complicated than that. Even though the focus when it initially emerged was very much about succeeding in the elections, they clearly have no electoral fantasies, and the EFF has been very much present in the continuing tides of social protest that have taken place in South Africa. Even within parliament they've had this quite incredible strategy, which looks
16:06 like it could even have come out of a Leninist playbook, of really delegitimising the parliament. What they talk about is raising the contradictions of the street into the parliament. So they go into parliament wearing not the usual suits that ANC politicians are wearing, but red overalls, or the outfits that domestic workers wear in South Africa for the female parliamentarians. And a small bloc of 25 members has succeeded in causing absolute chaos. They have been removed now three or four times, the
16:38 latest incident during the State of the Nation address, in which they came through on long-standing promises to completely disrupt Zuma's address by shouting "pay back the money, pay back the money", in reference to enormous corruption charges that he's been involved in. And they were removed by 50 or so plain-clothes police, while the ANC established a jammer in the parliament to block signals going out so that people couldn't be sending images of those things. So this quite
17:08 incredible strategy that they've been undertaking over there. And there's been a big debate on the left — a lot of people, because of the authoritarian past of Malema and the other characters, have said that this is a form of proto-fascism. I think that's completely ridiculous. I don't think the fascist category makes any sense within South Africa, and I think most of us, the DLF and others, have been insistent on saying that we need to see the EFF very much as a process of something that's been able to give political expression to an enormous basis of unrest in South
17:39 African townships, where nobody before had succeeded in this. As I suggested, it's full of all different kinds of layers and uneven consciousnesses and different political ideologies, and it absolutely makes sense for progressives to be working at least somehow amongst the grassroots layers of the EFF — even if, as I think some other comrades in the DLF have made a mistake of, being a little bit uncritical about what Malema himself and his close people in what they call the war council, I think
18:11 is the name — the EFF has a lot of militaristic imagery; Malema himself is referred to as the commander-in-chief. So we need to be very realistic about what he himself represents, but it's definitely a very interesting process that I think progressives need to be part of. So, just quickly then: what's happened to the ANC since the massacre? Well, a few months afterwards they had their congress, in which Zuma was elected virtually uncontested as president, and none other than the Butcher of Marikana, Cyril Ramaphosa, was elected to the deputy presidency
18:44 of the ANC. So that's of course absolutely symbolic of their rightward consolidation: in the face of this massive labour rebellion, in the face of these huge left fragmentations, has been a desire to actually cleave closer to big business and to demonstrate their commitment to the continuation of a neoliberal programme. Also symbolic of that was the decision by this congress to ram through the acceptance of a National Development Plan, which was written up by the famous neoliberal finance minister Trevor Manuel — and his
19:15 deputy in the Planning Commission was actually the same Ramaphosa, the odious Butcher of Marikana. This was essentially a ridiculous 500-page thing that gives a 30-year plan for the government that nobody really listens to except for the economic section. The economic section is really to insist that we continue this programme of wage squeezing, export-led growth. So we've had Zuma's continuing domination of the ANC,
19:46 we've had a Zumaisation of the party since then. What's being revealed to us now in quite shocking fashion, quite sadly actually — because when Zuma took over from the previous president, Thabo Mbeki, a lot of people said, for all his faults at least he has a slightly more democratic character. And what we're realising is that that couldn't be further from the truth. Zuma himself comes out of the very Stalinist security service apparatus of the ANC — he was the leader of their secret service, Mbokodo, for many years. And
20:19 what's happened, as is being revealed, is that he has essentially stacked the state, all areas of the state, the judiciary, everywhere, with very wide patronage networks that are having a very corrosive effect on the institutions of bourgeois democracy in South Africa, and really quite terrifying. We're seeing the growing involvement of the security cluster and the spying apparatus in factional battles and in the repression of these emerging left oppositions. So just quickly to talk about
20:51 the election. The ANC was still able to win, despite this growing opposition, a substantial majority, 62.5 per cent or something. On the one hand we need to be very frank about what this symbolises: that ANC hegemony isn't going to disappear overnight. On the other hand there are a lot of mitigating factors around this. There were much lower participation rates in the election, that's the first thing. In absolute
21:21 terms they got a lower number of votes. A lot of what they were able to hold on to had to do with their absorption of Zulu nationalist traditional parties in the rural areas, and really that's where the support base has been maintained. Very important in that has been the ability of the ANC to use the state resources, and in particular the welfare system, to mobilise support — to literally go out to rural areas and say, look, if we don't get back into power you're going to lose your social grants, which directly support 17 million South Africans. So there's a
21:52 whole bunch of circumstances that suggest that the ANC's support is still there but it's a lot more fragile than that election result might suggest. So very quickly, the last thing, on the exciting movements in the unions. Already by sort of 2011, 2012, in the midst of this crisis, we started to see some fragmentation in COSATU, and a more vocal opposition emerging to the ANC government led by these left
22:23 sections: the secretary general, a man by the name of Vavi, and the metalworkers' union. Initially there the slogan was demanding what they called a Lula moment from Zuma, which refers to Lula from Brazil, his second term in office where he supposedly had his left turn. And then it was really of course Marikana and the labour rebellion that followed that was the thing that really split these fissures open. So immediately after the massacre you had the Communist Party and the right within the National Union of Mineworkers and
22:54 the right within COSATU calling actually for increased repression of the mineworkers' struggle, for the militarisation of the area, and for Communists to support the repression of workers. And from that point already you had the mineworkers refusing to go along with this line, and marching separately from the SACP, and calling for support for the metalworkers' struggle. And then from there those contradictions developed. Once the ANC accepted the National
23:25 Development Plan at its 2012 congress, and elected Ramaphosa, NUMSA came out more or less into open opposition and said that their continued participation in the Alliance must be contingent on the ANC scrapping this development plan and implementing the Freedom Charter as it had promised to do decades ago. At its congress it then takes a decision to start the formation of a United Front for Socialism in late 2013. And then very shortly afterwards this left
23:55 secretary general is expelled from the union under charges of some very dodgy things he did with a junior staff member. And then there's an emergence of really two factions within the union movement: NUMSA leading the one, with seven other unions that are starting to demand a special congress in order to resolve the battles in the union, and are demanding that COSATU now look elsewhere from the ANC for its political home and begin the development of a
24:26 movement for socialism. And then eventually NUMSA itself is expelled from COSATU. And just this December has launched this United Front for Socialism, which is obviously an incredibly important development in South African politics. For many on the left this has always been looked forward to as the second coming — we were always very aware that, because of the nature of the ANC dominance,
24:58 really the formation of any kind of mass alternative was contingent on the union movements being able to accept a political alternative. So undoubtedly this has generated enormous enthusiasm around the world for the potential involved in this process, and I would absolutely support that. There are incredible opportunities that could come out of this thing. But it's also not that we're going to have a radical socialist
25:28 movement falling from the skies in all of this. We need to be quite critical about the elements that are involved in this process. We need to be quite aware of the fact that it is going to be a long process of building up a basis for unity amongst workers that have been trapped in a Stalinist corporatist alliance for 20 years with the ANC, have been totally alienated from the social struggles that have been taking place in the country. And so there's a lot of political work ahead. But I think we are very excited.
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