South Africa’s Political Crisis

In August 2012, 34 striking mineworkers were shot dead by police at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. The event drew global attention to South Africa and the gross inequalities and social injustice that continue to blight the country’s fledgling democracy just 20 years after apartheid. According to Desmond Tutu (2012), the event reflected how

unhealed wounds and divisions from South Africa’s past fatally combined with the reigning climate of political intolerance to trigger the appalling events.… As a country, we are failing to build on the foundations of magnanimity, caring, pride and hope embodied in the presidency of our extraordinary Tata Nelson Mandela. We have created a small handful of mega-rich beneficiaries of a black economic empowerment policy while spectacularly failing to narrow the gap in living standards between rich and poor South Africans.

Since the beginnings of the neoliberal era in the 1980s some scholars have argued that alliances between trade unions and political parties can no longer be justified given that they seldom offer anything more to the trade unions than a tokenistic opportunity to influence the party when it takes up a seat of government. Leading labour scholars have thus called on unions to take on a more radical counter-hegemonic posturing by forging alliances with civil society groupings and joining the ‘movement of movements’ against neoliberal globalisation (Fairbrother and Yates 2003; Moody 1997; Turner et al. 2001; Waterman 2001).

As the last chapter demonstrated, growing ideological differences over how to respond to militant strike action, Marikana and the ANC government more broadly have emerged within the Alliance. While the continuity faction advocates continued engagement with the ANC government and has been more supportive of Jacob Zuma’s faction of the ANC, the change faction has become increasingly critical of Zuma’s government and of the shortcomings of the Alliance in general. At the extreme end of this faction rests NUMSA, and among many commentators NUMSA’s move to break with the ANC and form a workers’ party reflects a welcome boost to an otherwise disjointed and poorly articulated collection of protest movements in South Africa (Bond 2014; Naidoo 2014; Saul 2014). Indeed, among some labour analysts the breakdown of the Alliance was an inevitable long-term consequence of its inherent ideological contradictions after the ANC embraced neoliberalism (Buhlungu 2005; Sparks 2003: 200), which is a welcome development that could introduce the long overdue ‘substantive uncertainty’ in South African politics and galvanise a new left wing electoral politics (Bond 2010; Gumede 2005: 272; Habib 2005; Habib and Taylor 1999b, 2001; Harvey 2002; Legassick 2007).

South Africa’s trade unions are believed to hold the key not only to galvanising a new class politics in South Africa; they are also lauded as an example for labour movements in other parts of the world to follow in their struggles against neoliberal globalisation. This stems from COSATU’s pivotal role in the struggle against apartheid: it was a role made possible by an adherence to what Webster (1988) identified as ‘Social Movement Unionism’ (SMU), combining deeply embedded traditions of democratic shop floor organisation (which encouraged rank-and-file militancy) and engagement in a broader political struggle to overcome apartheid in alliance with other social movements (Baskin 1991; Buhlungu 2004; Friedman 1987; Siedman 1994; Wood 2003). This won the labour movement global acclaim, and academics heralded South Africa’s unions’ virtuous commitment to democratic organisation, membership participation, linkages with civil society and broader social/political goals as a model of unionism that could be replicated elsewhere in an effort to regenerate labour moments in the north in particular (Clawson 2003; Moody 1997; Waterman 2001). Moody (1997: 201–227), for example, implores northern unions to ‘look south’ to the example of SMU offered by unions in Brazil and South Africa who, Moody argues, have retained a ‘solid class outlook’ in their political organisation.

In the labour studies literature, democratic union organisation and workers’ control over the direction of union struggles are deemed essential to checking the ‘oligarchic tendencies’ of union leaders who, it is assumed, are inherently more inclined to reach accommodations with management or political leaders owing to the bureaucratic pressures on their positions (Lipset 1977; Michels 1962). It is argued that the democratic organisation of unions can act as a counterweight to such bureaucratic tendencies by transferring power to ordinary members and thereby giving greater weight to their demands (Wood 2003).

In May 2014 the ANC secured a fifth successive landslide election victory, garnering an impressive 62 per cent of the poll, which reflects the party’s continued domination of South African electoral politics. The ANC, like other liberation movements in the Southern African region (Dorman 2006; Melber 2003), has sought to command a position within South African politics and society that extends well beyond that traditionally occupied by a political party elected to serve a term of office: it discursively constructs itself as a liberation movement charged with radically transforming South African society as part of an ongoing (and seemingly infinite) ‘National Democratic Revolution’ (Darracq 2008; Lodge 2004; Southall 2009, 2013). Dorman notes the manner in which the ANC has employed the ‘exclusionary languages of liberation’ to construct and maintain an insider/outsider dichotomy whereby the ANC depicts itself as the ultimate guarantor of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’, which it alone is mandated to fulfil (Dorman 2006: 1092). Johnson (2003: 218) thus notes how

by virtue of its impartiality, the democratic state is seen as the only legitimate expression of the interests of the whole nation, becoming coterminous with the ‘national interest’ or the ‘public will’. At the same time all other demands or proposals for social change emanating from outside the state are viewed as partial, subjective or sectarian, regardless of the legitimacy of the demands.

The events of the last few tumultuous years in South Africa have undoubtedly drawn international focus to the country. The death of the ‘father of the nation’, Nelson Mandela, coupled with the brutal massacre of striking mineworkers in Marikana, provoked a period of reflection on just how far South Africa has progressed in the two decades since apartheid. In one moment, the images of police standing over the bodies of dead workers in Marikana reminded South Africans of a not too distant past, but they also laid bare the realities of South Africa’s violent present. It might sound strange or even alarmist to describe South Africa as a country beset by endemic violence, but not if we consider violence in a broader sense. Structural violence — in the form of massive inequalities of opportunities and resources that prevent people from achieving their full potential — continues to represent the defining feature of post-apartheid society. As Johann Galtung (1969) would have it, we can only consider a nation to have attained a meaningful peace when there is an absence of such structural violence. South Africa’s elusive social peace therefore reflects its unfinished project of liberation, one that has not yet sufficiently emancipated people from massive structural inequalities of class, race and gender.