“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” So wrote the American author Maya Angelou. A fellow writer, James Baldwin also noted: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
These were both reminders that we need to know our history in order to understand perhaps where we are today and how we came to be where we are; that we need to understand reality and to face it in order to progress. Such advice seems particularly pertinent in these, at first sight, very confusing times.
It also seems essential because of some of the mythology and distortions of history that are being peddled, either knowingly or through ignorance in South Africa. References to what is happening being part of an ill or undefined “NDR” (National Democratic Revolution) or “developmental state” also help to obscure rather than to clarify anything.
For many in the labour movement and the wider public, the fact that Zwelinzima Vavi, as general secretary of the country’s largest trade union federation, Cosatu, was wooed by the ANC to join its national executive at the very time he was leading a mass protest against government policies was very confusing. Even more confusing was the presence of higher education minister Blade Nzimande on a protest march called by Cosatu against policies he, as a cabinet member, had approved.
At the same time there were also quite widespread rumours — publicly denied, but privately confirmed — that a government position had been suggested to a leading figure in the politically non-aligned Federation of Unions of SA. This federation and other, independent unions have frequently been criticised from within Cosatu as “social democratic” or even “liberal”.
Nzimande, is his other executive role as general secretary of the SA Communist Party (SACP) has been particularly scathing about “liberals”. Writing in the SACP online journal, he claimed: “Liberalism in general and its different South African shades has only been consistent on one and only one thing, political hypocrisy.”
He equated “liberals” with the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) that has its roots in the Progressive Party that supported a qualified franchise for black people. But there was a Liberal Party (LP), formed in the same year — 1953 — that the SACP was launched as an underground formation. It had a non-racist constitution, supported votes for all and, like the Communist Party of SA had done in 1950, was forced to dissolve itself in 1968 when the apartheid state introduced laws that made it impossible to continue functioning.
In 1963, a minority of LP members, together with members of the tiny Socialist League, a grouping of “anti-Stalinist” communists, established the African Resistance Movement (ARM) that conducted a sabotage campaign against the government. An ARM member, John Harris, was hanged and his name was among one of the early ones inscribed on the Wall of Remembrance in Freedom Park in Pretoria.
Given this background, it might seem obvious that these liberals would be natural allies of the ANC. In fact, a number are today supporters and members of the governing party while some support the now non-racist DA.
The confusion arises because the posturing, comments, protests and criticisms are all part of a series of skirmishes in which the desire for power and patronage competes with, and often overwhelms, principle; where individual agendas are in play against group ideologies — and all form part of the underlying struggle for and against trade unions and their ability to act independently.
Currently, the SACP, which counts among its members most of the Cosatu executive, is making a concerted play to gain greater influence and a larger membership. It also professes to be not A workers’ party, but THE workers’ party; such a position brooks no challenge and results in calls by SACP members for all union officials to be “party members”. This would shut out those labelled social democrats or liberals.
But just as the SACP is trying to gain greater influence within the labour movement, so too is the ANC to which SACP members also belong. As has been noted here in the past, trade unions, because of their size and the positions of their members at the points of production, distribution and exchange, are potentially enormously powerful, whether as a voting bloc or pressure group. So they are obvious targets.
This is as it has always been although, in the first place, neither governments nor bosses saw any need for independently organised labour. They attempted to eliminate such organisations by brute force, threats and accompanying legislation.
But workers fought back and the nature of modern industry made their organisations essential in parliamentary democracies, both to protect wage earners and to provide a structure with which governments and employers could negotiate. Violent confrontation gave way to more subtle manoeuvring as employers, governments and political parties attempted to influence, even control, trade unions.
This is the war that is ongoing against a labour history littered with images of the assassin’s bullet, the hangman’s noose, prisons, transportation and torture. For many in the global community, these are grim reminders of past times; in some countries, they remain a reality. In Iran, for example, former teachers’ union activist and university lecturer, Abdolreza Ghanbari is about to face the hangman, having been found guilty by that theocratic tyranny of “enmity towards God”.
Then there are the trade unionists who are assassinated and who regularly “disappear” in countries such as Colombia or North Korea where the bosses and the state continue to frustrate the emergence of independent wage-earner organisations. Closer to home, in Zimbabwe and, especially, Swaziland, where the embattled labour movement last week formed a single federation, governments have adopted an aggressive and often violent approach to unions.
In South Africa, the battles between the “social partners” and competing political parties is much more subtle. But the system is far from stable; a situation exists that might best be described as armed truce punctuated by frequent breaches. And the underlying war continues.
Cape Town, South Africa-based journalist commentator and author specialising in political and economic analysis and labour matters. 
Terry Bell Writes 
Dr Selim Gool
March 16, 2012
Dear Terry!
Unless one is still wearing Pink-Tinted 60´s Hippie-Lennon specs, I cannot understand the “confusion” (Confusionism?) you refer to!
The Popular Front strategy in South Africa has taken many forms since 1936, so even the so-called Trotskyists of the “Workers Party Of South Africa” (WPSA) took part in its initial organisational form (The National Liberation League, The National Liberation Front) in 1936-38; in exile, the ANC in 1969 renounced its former “ethnic nationalism” thus allowing many of the best cadre from the former “Ethnic Congesses” and the SACP to join and participate in the National Leadership (´Uncle Joe´ Slovo, Reggie September etc) and thus shed its OUTWARD skin of ethnic nationalism (“inside” the movement it was of course another matter!)
On the labour front, from the formation of FOSATU in 1979 to 1985 there was a battle betwen the old SACTU/ANC/SACP cadre and the newer “independent” union radicals and their programme of One Federation Unity, Workplace Democracy from Below (Alec Erwin “sold out” in becoming a ANC Minister eh!) – this was clearly in opposition to the ´Bureaucratic Centralism´ of the ANC carde who made a “coup” on 30 November 1985 and Hey Presto! COSATU was part of the Populist-Nationalist ANC Alliance! Hence the “Multiple Hats” people like Moses Mayekiso and Joe Foster (ex-FOSATU) etc were wearing in 1994!
Simple hey!
Terry Bell
March 16, 2012
Ah, yes, Selim, simple perhaps for you or even perhaps for me since we have both been around for some considerable time and have devoted time and effort to learning about and critically analysing our history. But there are many younger — and not so young — people out there who are woefully ignorant of the history. As such, they become very confused at the carryings on of various insttutions and individuals.
I merely tried to add a bit of historical background in a way that might precipitate some debate. Your comment will also, hopefully, motivate some readers who were not aware of the background and incidents you refer to, to go back and read, check — and join in fruitful debate that may, eventually, lead to equally fruitful action.
Selim
March 17, 2012
I agree totally Terry! Maybe my “flippant” tone is to be scutinised but as a high.school teacher and college lecturer for the latter part of my life, I found that a bit of “subtle humour” makes for easier communication than those dogmatic utterances from a “learned all-knowing individual”!
However, there is a question that I must raise as I found myself very often in the center of many dog-fights within the Movement, i.e. both¨the Unity Movement tradition of my elders and of the Congress tradition that I consciously joined in the early 1970s. Their “reading” or “understanding” of their own traditions has its shortcomings, so some common mythologies have been reproduced, repeated and taken as “Gospel” by the faithful in both camps.
Take the question of the ARM that you mention in your original piece. I got to know one of their members quite well, the late physicist-cum-historian Baruch Hirson, and we shared many intimacies in London over the years I knew him. He was actually very “critical” of his own role in the ARM, of the actual bombing campaign which landed him a prison sentence of 10 years.
His later works, like “Year of Fire, Year of Ash: The Soweto Revolt – Roots of a Revolution (Zed Press, 1979) was written a a clear, concise pedagogical manner, while however his collected articles, “A History of the Left in South Africa: Writings of Baruch Hirson”, I.B. Tauris, London, 2005, is outside of the price-range of any studen,t or researcher for that matter! Pity then that his work will remain unknown and discussed by a select few who have access and knowledge. I made taped recordings of our discussions but these have not survived.
So let me humbly say that I am willing to discuss all these issues raised above and that I hope that many of our readers are able to participate with comments, annecdotes and so on.
Terry Bell
March 17, 2012
No, Selim, your tone need not be scrutinsed. I too adopt what some might term a “flippant” tone, so we are apparently on the same page. I am also concerned about the sources of our history that have been lost or destroyed.