Chapter 4

Cracks in the Monolith: Social Movements in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The mass movement against apartheid in South Africa was one of the last great liberation movements of the twentieth century and the ending of apartheid one of the century’s most momentous achievements. In the country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the millions involved in the liberation movement swept the African National Congress (ANC) into government with more than 62 percent of the vote in a near-100-percent voter turnout. It is not hyperbole to say that the election of Nelson Mandela as the first Black president of South Africa was the high point of this struggle, signaling a fundamental shift in the course of South African political history. It inspired hope not only in South Africa but across the world as the global media heralded the “rainbow nation,” the “miracle nation,” and the “new South Africa.” The early years of the transition to a non-racial liberal democracy captivated the world and were championed in a plethora of bestselling books, such as Tomorrow is Another Country by Alistair Sparks.1

Eighteen years on, a raft of political and social changes have taken place. Many of the rights long won and taken for granted in much of the world—such as the right to strike and to form political parties—are now enshrined in South African law. Beyond institutionalizing regular free and fair elections based on one person, one vote, the new Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) and the Bill of Rights enacted a range of progressive changes that commit the state to combating all forms of discrimination. Built on the cornerstone of progressive liberalism, these founding documents went much further and enshrined a number of socioeconomic rights that were self-evident for much of the Black population: the right to have access to adequate housing, sufficient food and water, health care, social security, and no arbitrary evictions.2 It imposed obligations on the new government so that “the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realization of each of these rights.”3 Crucially for the mass organizations that made up the liberation movement (trade unions, civics, women’s, youth, and faith-based groups, among others), these could be enforced through law, giving citizens the right to challenge the government and hold it accountable above and beyond elections.

Since 1995, the ANC government has also presided over the biggest economic expansion in contemporary South African history, as real gross domestic product (GDP) has risen on average 3.5 percent per year and access to housing, water, and electricity increased for millions of Black people. From 1993 to 2004, the percentage of households with access to piped water and electricity for lighting rose from 59.3 to 67.8 percent and 51.9 to 80.2 percent, respectively.4 Through social assistance, the government has distributed billions of rands to the poorest. Through child support, disability grants, and the old-age pension, the number of people receiving social grants between 1990 and 2006 rose from 2.6 to 12 million, reducing poverty among the poorest households.5

Yet, despite this progress, South Africa today faces a social crisis precipitated by widespread poverty and inequality, mass unemployment, and the world’s largest HIV/AIDS epidemic. The fallout from this process has resulted in a state of near-permanent political infighting inside the governing Tripartite Alliance as different factions maneuver for influence.6 Since the start of the global economic crisis in 2007, unemployment has risen to more than 31.2 percent as nearly a million jobs have been lost.7 In the years immediately preceding the recession, approximately 5.5 million people were infected with HIV, many of them unemployed.8 In 2009 South Africa overtook Brazil as the country with the widest gap between rich and poor, with a Gini coefficient index for income inequality of 0.679.9 A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in January 2010 notes, “In sum, there is something of a consensus around the direction of post-Apartheid inequality and poverty trends even if there are disagreements about the precise levels at any point in time.”10 Using the most conservative estimate, by 2004 there were some 15.4 million people living below the R250 per capita per month poverty line.11 Although income poverty has fallen slightly, the gap between rich and poor has grown wider as the income of the richest ten percent rose from 54 to 58 percent of total income between 1993 and 2008. Inequality within each of South Africa’s four major racial groups and between groups also widened. That is, just over twenty years after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, the gap between rich and poor Africans (intra-African inequality) is bigger than the gap between white and African people.12

Consequently, life in post-apartheid South Africa is characterized by extremely uneven social and economic development, the result of which has been “a staggering collapse in the sense of social justice, ethics and moral values,” where “the dream of a caring and compassionate society, which many fought for during the liberation struggle, has turned into a nightmare” as millions are mired in poverty.13 Given what has been documented elsewhere in this book, it would not be unreasonable to find that those organizations and people who make up social movements have been bought off and subsumed under the political wing and largesse of the post-independence ruling party.

While the ANC acts as a monolithic bloc in the electoral arena and has attempted to use civil society to close down and crush dissent, this has not prevented factures and tensions from developing in and around the ruling Tripartite Alliance and the emergence of new, if small, constellations of social forces critical of the government. To understand how and why this has happened and to assess the political prospects of social movements, it is important to consider the interdependent processes that constitute the totality of lived experience. For example, just twelve weeks after the 2009 general election in which 65.9 percent of voters re-elected the ANC for the fourth consecutive time, the country was scandalized by a spate of riotous, violent township protests involving tens of thousands of people. While the protests caught many pundits by surprise, the complexity of South African political life and the stubborn nature of social movement protest were captured by one analyst who noted that in South Africa, “they don’t just vote, they throw bricks as well.”14

From the outset we want to make it clear that, while at a general level the breadth and depth of social movement activism is not at the levels it was in the mid-1980s at the height of the liberation movement,15 it has, we would argue, made significant contributions to democratic life since 1994: simultaneously nurturing, cementing, and challenging the boundaries of a South African body politic by making claims and demands and by claiming ownership of and winning important social and political gains. To do so in an environment riven by the “twin virus” epidemics of mass structural unemployment and HIV/AIDS is all the more remarkable and demands our attention in much the way that the history of rebellion against apartheid did.

This brief overview, then, provides the broad contours upon which any understanding of social movements and the South African social and political landscape can be mapped and followed. To understand the role of social movements in South Africa, we need to interrogate the nature of those contours and map their genesis in the liberation movement. We begin this chapter by looking at the history and role of social movements in ending apartheid and constituting democracy up until the advent of majority rule in 1994. We then show how the liberation movement struggled to adapt to the new conditions of legality during the initial phase of the transition to democracy under the presidency of Nelson Mandela until 1999.16 As the euphoria of the Mandela years faded, we look at how the “sharp jostle of experience” under the presidency of Thabo Mbeki gave rise to a range of new township-based organizations that clashed, collaborated, and vied with the pre-existing movements, adding to the chorus of demands for “a better life for all.”17 We then look at the period from 2007 onward, when amid a rising tide of strikes and “service delivery” protests, former Deputy President Jacob Zuma replaced Thabo Mbeki as president of the ANC and was subsequently elected as national president in April 2008, rocking South African politics. The backdrop to this was a new wave of sustained social movement activity that made South Africa one of the protest capitals of the world, showing once again that social movement activism is woven into the very fabric of South African life.

Social movements and the rise and fall of the apartheid state: 1948–1994

When the Dutch East India Company built a settlement at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, it set in motion a distinctive capitalist mode of production, a process that resulted in the development of rural wage labor and subsequently, as “white” capital moved into mining and industry, a Black working class. Effectively forced into wage labor in farming, mining, and, increasingly, industry, the Black working class began to develop in both rural and urban areas. From the unification of South Africa in 1910 until democracy in 1994, the Black population was denied political rights based on racial status. The ruling class created social and economic structures to foster the efficient and profitable exploitation of labor, underpinned by a system of state-administered labor controls (referred to as the “pass laws” or “migrant labor system”) that strictly controlled the movement of Black workers and reinforced the “color bar” that legally reserved skilled jobs for white workers. Wage labor increased as people were separated from the land by the Native Land Act of 1913; African farmers were increasingly proletarianized, resulting in an influx of landless people into urban areas.

Before the election of the National Party (NP) in 1948, growth accelerated through the expansion of industry during a period of import substitution industrialization.18 Setting up parastatals (partially state-owned companies) like the Iron and Steel Corporation established a manufacturing base that dominated economic growth strategies up until the late 1970s and helped lay the basis for capitalist development. What was distinctive about the process of industrialization in the 1930s and 1940s was the way the government was able to help provide a cheap and strictly controlled Black working class. As import substitution industrialization continued during the 1940s, economic expansion was accompanied by an increase in the size of the workforce and demand for labor so that by 1946, the number of African people living in urban areas had risen by 36 percent from the previous decade.19

Historically, the rise of labor movements can be traced to times of rapid industrialization that created an urban working class of unskilled and skilled workers denied access to labor rights and social provisions. In South Africa, the ability of the white ruling class to render the majority of the Black population a permanent migrant labor force without citizenship rights depended on the successful repression of Black political and industrial organization. This in turn required both violence and a monopoly on the executive and legislative apparatus. Upon its election in 1948, the NP generalized the migrant labor system to cover the whole of the African population through a series of laws, resulting in the system of repression and control that became known as apartheid (“separate development”). Black people were denied political rights to stop them from becoming an integrated urban working class with their own trade union and political organizations, as the working classes of Western Europe and the United States had. In spite of this, and because of growing urbanization and the expansion of industry, new forms of resistance emerged and Black political and trade union organizations grew.

The contours of the liberation movement

South Africa boomed during the postwar “Golden Age” of capitalism (1950–73) and grew rapidly into a medium-sized industrial power. Between 1946 and 1975, growth averaged more than 7 percent, with employment (mainly African) in manufacturing growing faster than any other sector at 4 percent annually, from 855,000 workers in 1951 to 1.6 million in 1976.20 The economy diversified to include a growing manufacturing industry, summoning more African skilled labor into the growing cities. South Africa’s development into a technocratic state with a complex bureaucracy, managing a growing economy that provided for most white people, appeared economically sound and politically impenetrable.

However, the intensification of apartheid did trigger the development of popular organizations and protests. In the early 1950s, trade unions demanded better wages and conditions. In 1954, women in the Communist Party and the ANC founded the Federation of South African Women to campaign against the imposition of pass laws on women. The Defiance Campaign against Unjust Laws, a multi-racial civil disobedience campaign set up in 1952, sought the removal of six apartheid laws; it reached its peak with the Sharpeville massacre in 1960.21 On June 25 and 26, 1955, three thousand activists convened a Congress of the People in Kliptown, outside Johannesburg, and adopted the Freedom Charter, a statement of the movement’s central principles and demands, before being dispersed by police.22 The same year, fourteen government-registered unions left the Trade Union Council of South Africa because it would not admit African unions and formed the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), which became closely linked to the ANC. Notwithstanding this, general repression and harsh laws governing protest and trade union organization resulted in little overt challenge to apartheid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with strikes virtually unheard of. A period of political and industrial stability ensued.

Rapid industrial development had altered the size, racial composition, and skill levels of the growing labor force. The Black population was diverse and stratified by class and gender. Drawn into urban areas, these people—migrants, the lumpenproletariat (township and rural unemployed), and an industrial working class, together with sections of the petit bourgeoisie and students—came to form the mass base of the liberation movement. This process had a political effect on the ability of people to organize; industrial expansion, technological change (one consequence of which was continuing high levels of both rural and urban unemployment), and “better” education facilitated agitating and organizing opportunities. The denial of basic human rights to the vast majority, along with increased racism, segregation, and oppression of Black people, generated profound social repercussions. This gave rise to an independent labor movement and other civic and township-based organizations that were to form the backbone of a liberation movement that could now articulate popular mass-based demands.

A wave of mass strikes between 1973 and 1976, creating a climate of revolt that spread across the country as student activists began to forge links with workers through discussions about wage levels, legal advice, and organizing. The context was the impact of the global recession of the mid-1970s that reverberated and developed into the deepest and longest recession in South African history. In response to the onset of crisis, the nationalist stage of state-led development gave way to a monetarist phase—and to a growing and more militant opposition.23 This crisis displacement fueled protests, particularly by the growing and increasingly organized Black working class after the years of repression in the 1950s and 1960s.24 Newly formed organizations pulled together trade unionists, previously unorganized workers, intellectuals, and students. They emphasized rank-and-file factory organization, with a view to building strong factory-based unions and stressing wider political concerns in the longer term. This laid the basis for a new generation of trade unions and a period of industrial militancy that profoundly destabilized the apartheid economy.

The workplace was not the only area where conflict and protest developed. Education was segregated and unequal before apartheid; the increase in Black education was intended to provide the country with a bigger skilled workforce linked to the changing nature of the economy and the labor process.25 The recession hit the poorest hardest. Unemployment climbed to a record two million; in 1975 the cost of living for a family of five in Soweto increased by 10 to 12 percent.26 The police shooting of Soweto schoolchildren on June 16, 1976 marked the beginning of eighteen months of national revolt.27 Anger and frustration dovetailed with the political work of Black consciousness groups like the South African Students Organization, led by Steve Biko, giving expression to the anger at the heart of a generation of young African people in Soweto. The riots served to bring a section of the working-class community together by fusing disparate individuals into a collective. The Soweto Uprising radicalized many students; some went on to become union activists in the workplace, where demands could be backed up by direct action in the form of strikes.28

Politically, the late 1970s and early 1980s marked a rise in the dominance of ANC (often simply called Congress) politics within the growing liberation movement, but also the growing role of new trade unions such as the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU). Formed in 1979, FOSATU represented a new development on the left. It was politically independent of the ANC and the South African Communist Party (SACP) and their now-exiled trade union wing SACTU. FOSATU emphasized working-class politics and the strategic importance of an organized working class to force change; its activists, working in unions like the National Union of Textile Workers and the National Union of Metal Workers South Africa, were often accused of being “workerist” or “economistic.” Congress activists characterized this as a form of class politics that reduced the democratic aspect of the struggle against apartheid to a working-class struggle against “capital,” thus reducing class struggle to economic struggle. They saw trade unions such as FOSATU as idealizing the essential form of socialist organization, with scant regard for other forms of political and community organization.

However, other “community unions” were indeed influenced by SACTU; they used mass mobilizations to build strikes, forge links with local communities, and display an overtly political profile that promoted the ANC. This period was a major turning point in the struggle against apartheid: it demonstrated the willingness, courage, and confidence of African people to physically confront the army and police and it shattered the relative social and political stability that had characterized South African politics since the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. Linking the militancy of the youth in the townships with independent working-class organizations created the embryo of a mass social movement that would challenge the regime in the 1980s.

Reform, repression, and revolt: The 1980s

The 1980s gave birth to the third major period of large-scale popular unrest since the early 1970s, culminating in two states of emergency and the founding of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the biggest trade union in African history. The decade began with a boycott by twenty-five thousand students in Cape Town that spread across the country. Black workers’ organizations launched countrywide strike actions on a scale not seen since 1973. Another recession began in 1982, and the ruling class began imposing monetarist policies such as tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in food subsidies for the poor, and a 7 percent sales tax on basic goods that penalized the Black working class. That working class was growing: the number of African workers employed in production was now more than two million.29 The growth of the independent unions and the wider liberation movement was aided by the founding of the National Union of Mineworkers, with forty thousand members.

In the townships, housing provision had not kept pace with industrial expansion since the 1960s, municipal infrastructure was poor, and there was little electrification and social provision.30 Government fiscal problems—worsened by economic recession and guided by a monetarist diktat in response to the ongoing structural economic crisis—kept social spending to a minimum in order to reduce state expenditure. The regime attempted to sow divisions among Africans by extending property rights to stimulate the growth of a Black middle class, but this strategy failed because building funds for housing had to be raised through a Black Local Authority (BLA). Rejected by the liberation movement as a substitute for proper representation, BLAs were an attempt by the apartheid regime to establish “autonomy” through local government structures for African residents of urban areas. Yet, as government economic policy was now informed by monetarism, BLAs received less government funding and sought to generate revenue through rent increases and service charges that worsened with the economy.

Like the independent unions, township-based civic organizations—known as “civics”—took advantage of government reforms and mobilized around local issues such as rent increases, evictions, and problems with water, electricity, roads, and street lighting. In a further attempt to use political reform to stave off more revolt, President P. W. Botha set up a new constitution and a tricameral parliament that included Indians and Coloureds for the first time, a measure calculated to divide the opposition. Again, this allowed the liberation movement to mobilize and politicize against a reform, thus revitalizing previously dormant organizations such as the Indian Congress. This mobilization eventually led to the formation of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in August 1983.31

The aim of the UDF was to link civics and other organizations both nationally and regionally and to provide leadership in broader political campaigns in order “to unite a broadest possible spectrum of people across class and color lines.”32 A popular alliance that drew on ANC traditions of non-racialism and Christianity, its formation was part of the ANC leadership’s attempt to influence the growing liberation movement. As UDF co-president Albertina Sisulu explained, “The UDF formation was pushed by the leaders when the leaders saw the people getting out of hand.”33 Linking with trade unions, they built solidarity and consumer boycotts and became a prominent force in the campaign to boycott local government elections. This also reflected the ANC-led Congress Alliance tactic of linking township, social justice, and workers’ rights organizations in popular and multi-class alliances.

The history of building multi-class popular alliances goes back to the African nationalist leadership of the ANC under Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Oliver Tambo in the 1950s. Recognizing that industrialization and urbanization were changing the social composition of African society, they sought to build alliances with trade unions and working-class township communities. This strategy dovetailed with that of the Communist Party, which, under orders from Moscow, pursued a “people’s front” that brought together differing social groups to strengthen national liberation. This meant dropping its earlier radical criticisms of nationalism. After 1950, the Communist Party, working inside the ANC, began to push its arguments for “revolutionary nationalism” as a prelude to socialism, linking this justification to its theory of “colonialism of a special type.” Briefly, this theory argued that Black South Africa was a colony of white oppressors, so its first objective had to be national liberation—linked to which was a two-stage approach to socialism. The first stage, national liberation, would be led by the ANC, and the second, socialism, by the SACP.34 This theory gave priority to the struggle for a “national democratic revolution”—one person, one vote, in a unitary state. The growing alliance between the two organizations gave the ANC political access to a bigger and broader social group of poorer Africans and workers. This early marriage of socialist and African nationalist ideas set the political tone for the direction of the African labor movement until the rise of the independent trade unions like FOSATU in the early 1970s.

So, despite the mass action of the mid-1980s and the ANC’s association with the SACP, which gave its politics a socialist gloss, the ANC leadership-in-exile played little part in mobilizations. ANC activists and supporters were nevertheless involved in all manner of struggles, and the leadership-in-exile made renewed efforts to relate to the unions and others through key positions in COSATU. Primarily, the ANC’s long relationship with the SACP helped it connect with growing demands for “socialism” in the trade union movement. The ANC also related to its mass base by setting up popular fronts such as the UDF, through which it could internally popularize itself and the national democratic revolution. In the mid- and late 1980s, “the dominant position within the ANC remained one that emphasises alliance building and contesting the so-called middle ground, through nation building and reconciliation—implying a nationalist alliance with differing social groups.”35 This suggests that trade union and other struggles, partially directed from exile, were aimed, at best, at “servicing broad class coalitions” (popular fronts—strategic alliances with other classes, especially business) that sought to focus social and economic demands into demands for national elections.36

However, “workerists” in and around FOSATU argued that popular fronts would mean that workers’ interests would come second to those of the “liberal” or more “progressive” sections of business. In the factories, mines, and offices, they argued, workers can begin to develop the collective power to end exploitation, whereas political struggles that coalesced around community politics did not have the same social weight as workers at the point of production—and so were often crushed. This was no academic debate. The differences raised important questions about what strategies and tactics could best be used to articulate the concerns of the Black majority. Congress (or populist) politics eventually more or less won the day, especially with the formation of COSATU in late 1985, and began to dominate the liberation movement.

The exiled leadership of the ANC, who had fled the country for fear of persecution, attempted to turn the campaign by Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation or MK, the ANC’s armed wing) into a “people’s war” and called for Black people to make the country “ungovernable” by creating “liberated zones” in the townships. Creating expectations of imminent and armed insurrection, the ANC national executive proclaimed 1986 the “Year of Umkhonto we Sizwe.” Ideologically, the ANC, now the unofficial leading organization of the liberation movement, seemed more uncompromising and clear that a political system under its leadership would be “people’s democracy” and that in accordance with the tenets of the Freedom Charter, it would seize the “commanding heights of the economy” and nationalize them. Despite such revolutionary rhetoric and renewed efforts to connect with mass action, however, at another level the ANC advocated negotiations.37

The ongoing social conditions for major confrontation—rent increases and workers’ and students’ grievances—gave rise to strikes, protests, and violence across the country between 1984 and 1986.38 In October 1984, up to two hundred thousand students around Johannesburg (the area known today as Gauteng) boycotted school. The unions and civics organized a stay-away (a form of protest similar to a general strike) around worker, civic, and student issues in which eight hundred thousand people participated, with more than 90 percent of workers in unionized plants taking action and as many as four hundred thousand students boycotting school.39 A two-day stay-away in November 1984 signified a new phase in the history of protest against apartheid as opposition organizations jointly coordinated action. Economic grievances came together with community and student unrest, with unions playing a leading role. This was “a milestone in the history of resistance as it was the first time since the 1950s a regional stay-away had been organized by a formal alliance of industrial unions and political organization.”40 The regime declared a state of emergency in July 1985, detaining eight thousand people and charging twenty-two thousand with protest-related offenses in the first eight months of the emergency.41 The formation of the UDF, the SACP, and the formal alliance in exile of the ANC (whose prestige grew massively in this period) represented the slow crystallization of a mass social movement of opposition increasingly dominated by Congress politics. The movement was consolidated and strengthened when at the end of 1985 COSATU was formed, with thirty-five affiliates representing nearly half a million members beneath a banner proclaiming “Workers of the World Unite!”42

Striking back: The 1986 strike waves

The partial state of emergency lifted in March 1986 was reimposed in June and in the year that followed, twenty-six thousand people were detained. There were mass arrests, beatings, torture, and political assassinations.43 The ruling class was under pressure to restore order and the basis for capital accumulation.44 The police and army rounded up and imprisoned, without trial, a core group of one hundred trade union activists, underscoring the importance and power of COSATU. Yet the resilience of the liberation movement, particularly organized labor, was self-evident. Despite some of the harshest repression in South African history, by the end of 1986 there had been 793 strikes involving 424,340 strikers, an increase of approximately 43 percent compared to 1985.45 Mass strikes and protests dominated social life; “By mid-1986 it seemed that . . . revolution was ‘around the corner.’”46

Yet severe repression dealt a devastating blow to sections of the liberation movement, as street committees and UDF and civics’ strongholds collapsed. In townships such as Alexandra (near Johannesburg) and Crossroads (near Cape Town), which were at the forefront of protests between 1984 and 1986, pro-regime groups regained control. Despite this, workers were still ready to fight. In 1987, half a million workers struck for more than six million working days, including the giant mineworkers’ union, which carried out the largest strike in South African history up to that point.47 Consequently, as civics and other community-based organizations were marginalized by repression, COSATU found itself carrying the mantle of the fight against the regime. It could fall back upon the locals and shop-floor structures—the core activist base developed in previous years.

As the end of the 1980s approached, structural economic faults continued to give rise to fiscal and general economic crisis and weakened the regime’s ability and confidence to set the agenda. At times, townships such as Alexandra were in a state of near-permanent siege. In an attempt to regain the initiative and shore up votes for an upcoming general election, the regime attacked COSATU’s offices. Police seized copies of its news magazine and even bombed COSATU House. COSATU set up a “living wage” campaign and together with the UDF used the election as an opportunity to signal their defiance. (COSATU and the UDF now routinely issued joint public statements, signifying the hegemony of the ANC.) The result was that 1.5 million workers and around a million students took part in demonstrations, underscoring the mass basis of the opposition to the regime and support for the (still-banned) ANC.

The regime responded with legislation banning sympathy strikes and, in February 1988, banned seventeen anti-apartheid organizations. The UDF and COSATU were prohibited from taking part in political activity. This did not prevent the biggest stay-away protest in South African history: three million people took part in a three-day protest in June. The general election to confirm F. W. De Klerk as president proved to be a turning point in National Party history: its 1987 majority of eighty in the House of Assembly was cut to twenty in September 1989. On September 6 and 7, 1989, as white South Africans went to the polls, two to three million workers took part in a stay-away. Hundreds of thousands of Coloured and Indian people boycotted the election, signaling the ongoing resilience of the liberation movement.48 In particular, the confidence and organizational strength of the labor movement was reflected in the fact that more labor days were lost through work stoppages between 1986 and 1990 than in the previous seventy-five years.49

The country was politically unstable, and with the economy showing no signs of recovery, President De Klerk was under pressure from business to provide stable conditions for capital accumulation. Externally the regime had been stalled, in effect defeated in Angola by government and Cuban troops at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in May 1988. This shifted the military balance of power in Southern Africa away from Pretoria, eventually forcing the apartheid regime to grant Namibia independence. As the international sanctions that began in 1985 continued, capital flight deprived business of much-needed investment, putting huge pressure on the regime to find a workable solution to the continuing political crisis of legitimacy, representation, and rule. South Africa’s economic woes increasingly required a political solution. Events beyond Pretoria proved the tipping point as the Eastern bloc collapsed in 1989, removing the international communist threat of which the regime had perceived the liberation movement to be the local flag bearers. On October 15, 1989, De Klerk announced the release of eight high-ranking ANC and MK political prisoners.

The ongoing recession had reached its deepest nadir by 1988–89. In August, the ANC launched a new Defiance Campaign to demonstrate to the regime the depth of its popular support and so present itself as the force that represented the Black majority. The civics, too, revived, their numbers swelling to approximately two thousand by the end of 1989; that year there were forty-nine rent and bond boycotts in the Transvaal’s eighty-two townships.50 This was the political backdrop to the Conference for a Democratic Future, held in December 1989 by liberation groups. The tone of discussion papers at the conference suggested that the path ahead would be that of negotiation as they endorsed, despite fierce discussions, the Harare Declaration, a document that made explicit the ANC’s desire for a negotiated settlement, thus presenting the ANC as the head of the liberation movement. The process of struggle against apartheid had reached a point where the Financial Times could write: “What once seemed impossible now appears likely: the release of Mr. Nelson Mandela in an atmosphere of relative calm; the beginning of negotiations which will lead to some form of franchise for blacks.”51

From grassroots to government, 1990–1994

With many anti-apartheid organizations unbanned and key leaders such as Nelson Mandela released from prison, the ANC became the de facto political representative of the liberation movement. While representing the liberation movement in negotiations with the regime, the actions of the ANC leadership can be understood as those of a “government-in-waiting” wanting to achieve a political solution that ensured long-term stability for itself. We know from the preceding chapters that transitions from liberation movement to independence party were underpinned by policy changes made in light of the strategic context. For the ANC, the political landscape upon which the liberation struggle had been fought was being transformed.

Though the ANC leadership was not committed to socialism, like many African national liberation movements it viewed the Soviet Union as some sort of model or check on US imperialism. The collapse of Eastern-bloc “communism” deprived the ANC of material and ideological support, and the variants of capitalism to which it could look to for guidance were limited. Other Third World state-led capitalist governments were under increasing pressure to reform along the lines of the emerging neoliberal Washington consensus. The weakness of the independent left inside the liberation movement meant that an alternative guide to practice and policy was missing. Consequently, the ANC’s strategy shifted so that “any compromise became tolerable if it did not block majority rule.”52 For the ANC leadership, this required concessions to avoid a political backlash and to convince the white bourgeoisie and international investors it could be trusted to govern. This also meant controlling its supporters, especially militant mass organizations like COSATU.

While the ANC, preoccupied with ending apartheid, had no substantial economic policy, its initial suggestions echoed work done by COSATU’s Economic Trends Group captured in the notion of economic “growth through redistribution.” This was in contradistinction to the “redistribution through growth” (trickle-down) ideas that reflected neoliberalism—many of which found their way into the ANC’s 1990 “Discussion Document on Economic Policy” that formed the basis for controversial Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy in 1996. Again, this was no academic debate. With a euphoric liberation movement—with COSATU at its heart—differences were not purely “technical realities” but constituted an element of the ongoing class struggle in ideological terms.

The process was not uncontested inside the Alliance. However, with SACP activists putting forward a “left version” of the two-stage theory of national democratic revolution (NDR)—liberal democracy first, “socialism” later—to justify tactical changes, what independent opposition existed was not able to mobilize others around its demands, and so critical voices were marginalized. Insofar as COSATU’s leadership were predominantly SACP activists, they were committed to the NDR. In this way, the role of SACP activists inside COSATU was crucial. Without any fundamental or credible opposition to the left as an ideological and organizational counterweight, the shift was easier. The SACP’s attempt to “de-Stalinize” the party in the process of democratically remaking itself suggests why so many independent (“workerist”) activists, such as former FOSATU general secretary Joe Foster and former leaders of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa Moses Mayekiso and Enoch Godongwana, joined the ANC and SACP. We can only speculate whether the failure of the independent left to build a political and organizational alternative in the workplaces and townships was one of the reasons behind its failure to counter the general direction of COSATU and the transition led by the ANC.53

Tensions remained. One hundred and twenty thousand people greeted Mandela at an unannounced rally at FNB stadium in Johannesburg on February 12, 1990, the day after his release, a striking symbol of the expectations for change. The significance of these dramatic days was not lost on those who took to the streets. This was not mere jubilation; it was political, as workers called for, among other things, a living wage and union recognition. As workers presented Mandela with a gift of a red car, symbolic of their aspirations, Moses Mayekiso stated, “We look to comrade Mandela to initiate a process of political settlement which will incorporate the needs and aspirations of workers.”54

As the ANC leadership edged closer to elected office, they deemed their more militant strategies of the 1980s inappropriate as the organization underwent its own transition to a party geared to electoral politics and government. In his autobiography, Mandela recalls seeing at a protest rally of two hundred thousand in June 1992, after the murder of forty-six people in Boipatong by supporters of the Inkatha Freedom Party, banners that read, “Mandela give us guns” and “Victory through battle not talk,” and thinking “it was time to cool things down.” Some ANC leaders called for abandoning negotiations, but he argued that “there was no alternative to this process.”55 This revealed the dilemmas and tensions the ANC leadership faced, their general commitment to negotiations, and how they viewed mass action. This was expressed by ANC deputy president Walter Sisulu: “We’ve got to get it across to people that we cannot work miracles, that we cannot overnight provide a house and a job for everyone—yet somehow we must keep their trust that we will try our best to improve everyone’s lives.”56 Nonetheless, the ANC used its leadership role to pressure the regime. A stay-away of four million workers in August 1992 was the largest political strike in South African history—demonstrating the willingness of the masses to take action.

Different sections of the liberation movement were also gearing up for the elections. COSATU held a special congress demonstrating its evolution to strategic unionism—a strategy through which the labor movement engages on an institutional level with the state and business to effect economic and political reforms. The ANC adopted the COSATU-inspired Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) as the centerpiece of its electoral platform. Keynesian in tone, the RDP was the program for a “new South Africa”: a pledge to build one million low-cost homes, provide electricity to 2.5 million houses by the year 2000, and provide running water and sewage systems to one million households. The potential clearly existed for COSATU to forge a working relationship with the ANC and influence the policy-making process, and the RDP encouraged this: “The RDP is focused on our people’s most immediate needs, and it relies, in turn, on their energies to drive the process of meeting these needs . . . the people of South Africa must together shape their own future. Development is not about the delivery of goods to a passive citizenry. It is about active involvement and growing empowerment.”57

As the ANC made increasing references to the role of markets and failed to make specific commitments to nationalization, tensions persisted. Leading ANC activist Tokyo Sexwale (now Minister of Human Settlements) noted, “If you give them politics, a flag . . . and you think that’s change, you are merely preparing for a second, more deadly revolution.”58 The pace of events quickened after the assassination of SACP leader Chris Hani on April 10, 1993. Two stay-aways and huge marches, organized in six days in response to Hani’s murder, gained 90 percent support in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area (now Gauteng) and around 88 percent in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), demonstrating that the ANC was indeed a government-in-waiting. In June 1993, elections were set for April 27, 1994. The ANC commenced its elections campaign in February 1994 and tens of thousands of COSATU shop stewards and other activists from social movements became a major driving force; COSATU handed over all of its offices and full-time staff to ANC election teams. Finally, a strike by civil servants in Bophuthatswana homeland in February quickly turned into a full-scale uprising as students and sections of the police and army joined workers, and the “Bop” Uprising in March became the last turning point on the path to elections.

From liberation to liberalization: April 1994–June 1999

The political dimension of the crisis of apartheid rule was broadly solved in April when the ANC won 252 of the 400 seats in the National Assembly and an overall majority in all but two of the provincial elections. The elections were a victory for South African social movements, who expected President Mandela and the RDP to begin solving the economic and social legacies of apartheid and to draft a new Constitution that would repeal apartheid legislation and enshrine equality before the law. Yet as we have seen, the evolution of the ANC and its policies represented a shift to the political center. Its resemblance to a traditional social-democratic party was reinforced when Mandela retained the NP’s finance minister, Derek Keys. In doing so, he “delighted investors, businessmen and white South Africans . . . the outside world . . . [with] his commitment to free-market economic and political moderation.”59

The ANC government set about establishing a new relationship with the external world, structured by South Africa’s location in the international division of labor and the post-1989 historical context. A process of political change was initiated in which the NDR was institutionalized, although, as we shall see, this was marked by political conflict and ideological disagreement within the Alliance and through the emergence of post-apartheid social movements, particularly from 1999 onwards. The “New South Africa” was re-classed as an “emerging market”; with the economy growing by 3.3 percent in 1995, poverty reduction became increasingly conditional upon a more orthodox economic strategy of “redistribution through growth.” Business leaders pressured the government to make the economy more competitive, aware that this would “almost certainly require a showdown with the country’s big trade unions.”60 This was signaled by a nurses’ strike in October and November 1995 over poor pay and working conditions that gave an early glimpse of disillusionment with the new government and the belief that politicians were jumping aboard a “gravy train” to enrich themselves. Nurses proclaimed, “We refuse to subsidise the government and their fancy cars. Viva RDP. We want some gravy.”61

In March 1996 the office overseeing the implementation of the RDP was closed and passed to the deputy state president, Thabo Mbeki. This was quickly followed in June by the release of a new macroeconomic strategy called GEAR, whose cornerstone was “fiscal discipline, tax concessions, moves towards scrapping exchange controls, sale of state assets and increasing flexibility in the labor market.”62 The fiscal policies in GEAR contradicted the ANC’s aims for social equity proposals as set out in the RDP. Although GEAR was based upon creating 833,000 jobs through a growth rate of 6.1 percent over four years, this was dependent upon attracting foreign direct investment.63 One element of this was to reduce trade tariffs and export subsidies, exposing South African companies to foreign competition, particularly Chinese, and world markets, in the process exacerbating tensions with labor.

Business leaders hailed GEAR as “investor friendly”; the Economist praised the ANC government for introducing a “conservative macroeconomic policy” and reassured investors that “for all the fears that resentful ANC socialists would confiscate wealth, the new breed shares the same capitalist aspirations as the old.”64 While the SACP leadership praised the ANC for resisting “free-market dogmatism” and keeping a key economic role for the public sector, COSATU reflected some of the unease workers had with the government, although complaints from the left centered on GEAR not being discussed first in Alliance structures. Other critics noted that GEAR “represented as much a form of self-imposed structural adjustment as anything else” and that this was not the start of the ANC’s slide to neoliberalism, “but was the aggregate of drifts” since the party’s un-banning in 1990.65 A showdown between the COSATU and the ANC government seemed inevitable.

In 1997 the economy only grew by 1.7 percent, and 142,000 jobs were lost even as the labor force grew by 320,000.66 In social policy, major pieces of legislation were enacted, principally the Housing Act of 1997, which repealed apartheid housing legislation. The government began working toward its goal of building a million houses within five years by providing a means-tested housing subsidy of up to fifteen thousand rands. This was enough to build a “starter dwelling,” but people had to raise further finance through bank loans. Between April 1994 and December 1997 more than seven hundred thousand subsidies had been processed, but only 385,000 houses were built or under construction. The RDP target was effectively scrapped, as the Housing Department took to combining the number of houses built and the number under construction. Housing, one of the key planks of the RDP, began to cause much consternation in community and labor circles.

“Normalizing” labor relations

Like other post-liberation ruling parties discussed elsewhere in this book, the ANC government did not waste time in trying to co-opt organized labor so as to regularize the relationship between labor and business as part of an attempt to create political and economic stability. COSATU leaders from the liberation movement were made ANC members of parliament and given jobs in government departments. A raft of legislation relating to labor was passed. The first was the Labor Relations Act (1995)—which COSATU supported despite its concerns. This law regulated relations between employers and employees and introduced a new system for resolving disputes—the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation, and Arbitration. The Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997) entitled all employees to basic conditions such as a maximum forty-five-hour working week; the Employment Equity Act (1998) gave practical expression to affirmative action. Although these changes enshrined in the new Constitution the right of employers to hire “scab” labor, the sanctity of capitalist social relations, and private property, they were welcomed by COSATU and many workers.67

Incorporating the existing labor leadership into corporatist bargaining arrangements to avoid conflict was another aspect of the ANC’s strategy. The introduction of the National Economic Development and Labour Council tied shop stewards into a bureaucratic process of negotiations that forestalled action and effectively pressured the COSATU leadership and shop stewards into “policing” their own members. This was part of a wider restructuring of industrial relations designed to coerce union officials into controlling the rank and file and to “normalize” industrial relations in ways similar to those found in Western Europe. COSATU called a national general strike on June 4, 1997, to protest government proposals on basic employment rights in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (1997). At the first post-election COSATU Congress in September 1997, Mandela tried to get COSATU to give GEAR a chance “but was openly snubbed by angry delegates.” The Congress unequivocally rejected GEAR.68

In December 1997, Thabo Mbeki took over from Nelson Mandela as leader of the ANC, effectively securing him as president after the June 1999 elections. Between 1996 and 1998, most of the targets set in GEAR were missed. Instead of economic growth, GDP fell from 3.2 percent in 1996 to 1.7 in 1997 and 0.1 in 1998. Instead of new jobs being created, job losses were 71,000, 126,000, and 186,000. Economic growth hinged on private sector investment, but shrank to minus 0.7 percent in 1998.69 Trade liberalization meant that clothing, textile, and shoe manufacturers shed 22,000 workers (predominantly women) in 1998, and there was a net loss of 120,000 jobs between 1998 and 1999.70 The rand crashed amid the Russian and East Asian financial crisis and in a further bid to attract foreign direct investment (now four times lower than in 1997) the corporation tax was cut from 35 to 30 percent (it was 48 percent in 1994). In November 1998, the government provoked further controversy that still haunts it today by announcing a thirty-billion-rand arms deal in which newly created Black empowerment companies would be boosted. Strikes increased, mainly around wages, putting further pressure on the government; the number of strike days, 3.8 million, was four times higher than 1997, although still not at the levels of the 1980s.71 Some strikes, notably those by teachers, municipal workers, and state utility workers, had an anti-privatization—and therefore “political”—element to them. Other strikes turned violent, such as one in July 1998 over job cuts linked to privatization in which airport workers fought pitched battles on the tarmac at Johannesburg Airport. One week later, striking miners set fire to a utility headquarters.

In terms of social policy, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) launched on International Human Rights Day on December 10, 1998, to address the government’s failure to provide medical and other support for the growing number of people living with HIV. While it went largely unnoticed at the time, TAC has gone on to become one of the most successful social movements. Building on the traditions of the anti-apartheid movement, it has built popular alliances with a range of forces like COSATU and the South African Council of Churches. Although not set up to challenge the government, it set about using allies in key places, including the state and the legal system, and took advantage of the new democratic freedoms to pressure the government. In the process, among other things, it forced the government to provide free anti-retroviral medicines for people living with HIV. 72

Although the ANC government missed many of the targets in the RDP and presided over the loss of half a million jobs in the first five years, voters demonstrated the extent of their loyalty in the 1999 general election by re-electing the ANC with 66.35 percent, thus surpassing April 1994.73 Would there be any change in the direction of the ANC under the stewardship of President Thabo Mbeki?74 Previous internal critics of the party, such as Winnie Madzikzela-Mandela, publicly said yes: Mbeki would be more radical.75 However, doing away with the legacy of apartheid would necessitate an increase in expenditure on housing and other social provision. Yet, by sticking to the provisions in GEAR, the government was constrained within its own conservative spending limits. Soon after the release of the ANC 1999 election manifesto, ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma said, “Nothing was going to change in terms of government policy.”76 Additionally, “senior politicians, including Mbeki himself, have not given any indicators they will compromise and have instead promised financial markets accelerated implementation of GEAR.” The corollary and contradiction is that, as Business Day noted, “although the ANC commits itself to increased social expenditure in the manifesto, the government has given no indication of reviewing its fiscal deficit upwards”—in other words, there were no plans to increase government spending.77 Just six weeks after the general election, tensions spilled over onto the streets in August as one million public sector workers struck. They were angry because the government, as an employer and signatory to the International Labor Organization, was violating conventions by ignoring the collective bargaining process. At the center of differences over wages and plans to “restructure” the public sector was the government’s GEAR policy.

Storm clouds gather over the Rainbow Nation

The advent of liberal democracy in South Africa took place under the leadership of an ANC government that accepted neoliberal policies as the best way to address the legacy of apartheid. It created corporatist institutions to restructure the relationships between state and society (including capital and labor) in an attempt to make South African capitalism more competitive. While formal rights and a liberal constitution represented progress, many problems and tensions remained. Uneven economic growth meant that racial inequalities persisted and were exacerbated by class, with the growth of a new Black middle class intensifying the inequality. Between 1991 and 1996, the proportion of Black households in the top 10 percent of all households increased from 9 to 22 percent; the richest 10 percent of Black people received an average 17-percent increase in income, while the poorest 40 percent of households experienced a decline of 20 percent. Much of this decline was concentrated in the period from 1994 to 1996.78

The re-election of the ANC in June 1999 could not simply be taken as a complete vindication of its work since 1994. The major cause of friction between the government and social movements, particularly labor, was GEAR. The credibility of GEAR (and by extension the government) depended on investors’ belief that the policy could be maintained; this required disciplining labor, which created tensions. As the new millennium approached, economic policy was the area of greatest contestation. This gave rise to conflict inside the Alliance, particularly with COSATU, but it also created the conditions that framed the emergence of a number of post-apartheid social movements. In the next section, we will document how this also created a new structure of opportunity for agitation and mobilization in and around the Alliance, as the expectations generated during the liberation struggle and the initial transition phase of democracy fueled rights-based claims.

New millennium, new movements

Globally, the 1990s began with the collapse of “communism” and the rallying cry of “there is no alternative” to the free market. Yet, paradoxically, the decade ended with the November 1999 “Battle of Seattle,” the coming-out party of the global anticapitalist movement, with its rallying cry “another world is possible.” Similarly, commentators could be forgiven for being puzzled by the emergence of post-apartheid social movements under the ANC government.79 However, when understood as a response to the local manifestation of neoliberalism expressed in GEAR, these movements’ development begins to make sense. As we noted in chapter 2, they are a key component of the global and continental response to the impact of neoliberal capitalism on the lives of working-class people.80

Particularly after 1999, a range of locally based social movements emerged across the country. Community-based organizations such as the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF) and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee in Gauteng, the Concerned Citizens Forum in KwaZulu-Natal, and the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in the Western Cape were an attempt to coordinate working-class people’s struggles against the ANC’s relentless commodification and privatization of basic services. Early on, two key national events helped to put these organizations on the political map and broadly situated them in an adversarial relationship with both the ANC government and the Alliance. The first was a march of twenty thousand people outside the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban in August 2001; the second, a march of twenty-five thousand in September 2002 outside the World Summit on Sustainable Development.81 The first, under the banner of the Durban Social Forum, was significant because it was the first large-scale, explicitly anti-government protest. The importance of the second, under the banner Social Movements United (led by the Social Movements Indaba Council), was that it was larger than an Alliance march at the same event and embarrassed the government in front of a global audience.82 What these organizations and protests demonstrated to the world (and the growing global anticapitalist movement) was the turbulent and contested nature of life in the Rainbow Nation.

What fueled some of the anger was plain to see. Ten years after the first democratic elections, the Labour Research Services Bargaining Indicators noted that directors received on average annual increases of 29 percent while workers received 6.5 percent—barely keeping up with inflation. The percentage of national income going to capital rose, giving rise to popular claims that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”83 In the context of executive directors receiving 111 times more than the minimum wage, Kevin Wakeford, managing director of Growth Africa, concluded that “economic policies have in fact been slanted in the favor of big business and at times they got away with murder.” He argued that the working class and the unemployed, among others, “have patiently endured the hegemony of big business influence during the past decade.”84

That the ANC strategy had not worked was implicitly recognized when, in the absence of private sector investment, President Mbeki announced in his 2004 state of the nation address that he would use state enterprises such as Telkom and Eskom to create enhanced conditions for doing business. The Financial Mail noted that “the mandate from Mbeki is unequivocal: make public corporations central to economic development and enable business to thrive through better service and cost-effective policies.”85 Effectively, this was a fine-tuning of GEAR, not a rejection of it. That rising inequality was a structural feature in the new South Africa was indicated by the Labor Research Services report and by a newspaper report that Patrice Motsepe (a Black mine owner) had, over ten years, amassed four billion rand in assets.86

No sooner had the stages been taken down after a series of government-choreographed events celebrating ten years of democracy than people were marching in the streets, as the country was engulfed in a number of violent strikes and protests. A number of events signified the growing scale of community-based protests and social movement actions. In September 2005, five thousand people, led by the recently formed Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers Movement, ABM), marched from the Kennedy Road informal settlement in Durban.87 Targeting the ANC council, they called for the resignation of their local councilor due to a lack of housing and poor service delivery. ABM has since attempted to develop links with other rural-based peoples and unemployed movements across the country.88 In February 2006 in Gauteng, people from Khutsong protested over their proposed transfer to the largely rural North West province municipality, fearful that this would decrease their chances of accessing municipal services such as water and electricity. After weeks of intensely violent community-wide protests, an incredible 99 percent of nearly thirty thousand local residents abstained from voting in the 2006 local government elections.

The fall of Mbeki and the breaking of the neoliberal consensus

By the end of 2006, there were on average approximately six thousand township and community protests a year, a greater rate than any other country in the world outside of China. That they were often, but not solely, organized by SACP and ANC militants is a strategic reminder to those who had written off the Alliance and many of the activists it comprises “as the mainstays of government policy” and for failing “to offer any meaningful responses to the changing conditions.”89 These protests, commonly referred to as “service delivery” protests, reflect a broader re-emergence of working-class action. A key turning point was the violent security guard strike of 2006. Although it was defeated practically, it reflected more than a fitful awakening. This was the start of an important convergence. While social movements and community revolts involved, in general, unemployed and informal workers, union militants were active in these movements, if not always leading the community-based struggles, as organized trade unionists.

The year 2006 signaled the revival of the organized working class, protesting in their communities and striking in the workplaces. Between 2003 and 2006, the number of days lost to strikes rose from half a million to 2.6 million, most of this in 2006.90 A major strike by public sector workers took place in June 2007 and became the largest strike in South African history. It lasted four weeks, with eleven million strike days lost, and included more than seven hundred thousand workers on strike and another three hundred thousand for whom it was illegal to strike. Strike support groups were set up, militant pickets guarded workplaces, and political slogans critical of the ANC slowly emerged. Yet the leaders of the social movements and organizations such as the APF and AEC saw the fulcrum of the struggle exclusively in the social movements and failed to consistently respond to these new developments. COSATU’s role in the Alliance led many activists on the left to discount the role of the working class—some even repeating the 1970s theory about the unionized representing a “labor aristocracy.”91 Consequently, the left made no consistent attempt to orient toward those strikes and protests in workplaces and unions. There were of course exceptions, but these were largely weak, inconsistent, and often limited to messages of solidarity or the occasional argument in the APF.92

We argue that as a consequence of these failures, the APF—as a symbolic and organizational example of the Social Movements Indaba (SMI) and the political uprisings against the commodification and failures since 2000—is in crisis. The failure to lead, organize, and develop a working-class base inside (or at least develop better links with) the main trade unions has been a major barrier towards the development of a radical left in South Africa. These are not historical arguments. Political transformations have followed from labor struggles. The re-emergence of more sustained strikes and township protests fed into the tensions and was reflected in the growing conflict and political maneuverings inside the Alliance. This resulted in open, growing criticism of Thabo Mbeki in the build-up to the ANC’s national congress in Polokwane in December 2007. What had once seemed unthinkable now seemed possible: the replacement of Thabo Mbeki as leader of the ANC and consequently as the president of South Africa. The uprisings and strikes represented a revolt against Mbeki’s neoliberalism.

Consequently, the militant strikes and the township protests over the last few years have had the cumulative effect of blowing apart the neoliberal consensus in the Alliance. Many, especially within COSATU and the SACP, hoped that the election of Jacob Zuma as president would usher in a new period of social stability and influence of the left inside the Alliance. The difference this time is that while previous protests have focused on issues such as lack of water and housing, today’s protests are more generalized and violent. As protestor Mzonke Poni told reporters in 2010, “The only way the government notices us is when we express our anger and rage—then they understand how we feel.” Zuma’s election and the defeat of Mbeki was a major turning point.93 As we have argued, the Alliance left, including elements of COSATU/SACP and millions who voted for the ANC, saw Zuma as a new broom. While we believe Zuma is a false messiah, this is not the point. He tantalized millions with the possibility of a new future for South Africa’s poor. While we see the emergence of the social movements starting in the late 1990s as important, it was the SACP and COSATU leaders’ articulation of anger and frustration with the government through Alliance structures that destroyed Mbeki. As we have seen, this has clearly had a significant effect on the Alliance. The emergence of the social movements, predominantly made up of poor, unemployed, and elderly people on welfare, and their creative and exciting forms of protest and struggle produced the first cracks in the ANC monolith. They have shown that you can challenge the ANC’s craven commitment to neoliberalism and that there is a political life outside of the Alliance. But for us it was the power, the presence, and the social weight of the organized working class on the streets, in strikes, and on picket lines that finally snapped Mbeki’s hold over South Africa.

However, given the scale of the uprisings that dominated the 1980s and the enduring strength of the trade union movement, notably COSATU, it is important to ask why the working class has not more directly challenged the direction of the ANC government. In part, both the leadership and the rank and file have pinned their hopes on elections as the best way to forge further change. Despite many militant protests, strikes, and fiery exchanges with the ANC (and at times SACP) leadership, COSATU’s role (like its affiliates) is linked somewhat to its general function as a trade union. Its leadership and many of its members share, at a general level, a basic assumption with the ANC leadership that capitalism is immutable and so seek to effect “capitalism with a human face.” In short, their preferred political option is to rearrange the pieces of the chess set rather than to throw away the game; hence, they turn strikes on and off like a tap to press for greater political leverage inside the Alliance.

However, this is not to reduce strikes as simply “procedural,” as social movement activists such Oupa Lehulere and Dale McKinley of the APF do. Zuma triggered the convergence of opposition to Mbeki’s politics. This—and the strikes and township protests—breathed new confidence into COSATU and SACP. The election created renewed opportunities to push back the neoliberal agenda. This shifting constellation of popular forces had the working class at its center. The way forward must be a unity between the organized working class, the township unemployed, and others who support the social movements. There is no Chinese wall or labor aristocracy that separates the two—the umbilical cord of inequality is what unites this working class. The disaster for the South African left has been a politics that has celebrated only the resistance of the poor while ignoring and denigrating the struggles of the organized employed. No united and cohesive movement has emerged from the recent protests, for such movements to develop the left must unite workers and unemployed. We make no claims that this will be an easy task or that the Alliance left has not been, at times, very hostile to other social movements. While COSATU and the SACP do not yet offer a counter-hegemonic alternative, such politics can emerge from this unity. Activists understand that movements do not emerge fully formed, but through a process of struggle and engagement. The xenophobic attacks on African immigrant workers in 2009 and the violence and domestic abuse widespread across South Africa express how people’s frustrations are diverted.

Clearly, in the short term, it is unlikely that these struggles can be united. Although some social movement activists, such as Dale McKinley, make calls for unity in the working class, this conceals hostility to COSATU and the SACP. Such unity can only be achieved through engagement with the main organizations of the working class. One obvious step would be a united front of popular struggles seeking to unite township protests and the organized working class. COSATU and its immense social weight, based as it is around the point of production, will be central to this united front, organizing and forging links with the unemployed and the unorganized in the formal and informal sectors. McKinley and others assume that we can ignore the leadership of COSATU and the SACP and that unity is simply a game of leapfrog. For all their weaknesses in seeing change as coming largely through maneuverings in the Alliance, the leader of these organizations are respected by millions and cannot be ignored.

Instead, we argue that the struggles need a common platform of demands which can unite everyone irrespective of political allegiances and ideas. This politics speaks of years of united movements where people march and protest on what unites them, while debating what does not. This approach has been described in Latin American politics as “talking while walking.” This future of common struggle is a challenge to the leadership of COSATU and the SACP, but also to the various independent organizations of the social movements: ABM, APF, TAC, and others. It offers the prospect of a unified struggle against neoliberalism in South Africa. If the global crisis has resounded with the death agony of neoliberal capitalism, the South African left has a responsibility to patiently craft unity against neoliberal capitalism which will inspire the continent north of the Limpopo to do the same.

Conclusion: A kaleidoscope of resistance and false prophets

As we argued at the start of this chapter, although social movement activity has not reached the dizzy heights of the mid-1980s, the country has been beset by a kaleidoscope of protests. The government has sought to defuse conflict with labor through corporatist bargaining relationships, but unlike many other post-independence African governments that were more successful in preventing industrial action than their colonial predecessors, the ANC government has, so far, been unable to prevent the development of class conflict or ensure that workers’ demands were solely addressed through recognized state structures. Despite sometimes violently suppressing some sections of civil society while trying to court others, the government has failed to smother discontent; while it has also sought to reconfigure state and civil society relations, post-apartheid South Africa has been punctuated by a number of mass strikes and a range of social protests. In differing ways, the wave of near-uninterrupted township protests since May 2009 and the renewed efforts at reinvigorating Alliance relationships under President Jacob Zuma both testify to COSATU’s continued use of direct action as leverage inside the Alliance.94

This climate of rebellion creates immense opportunities and challenges for radical activists to help organize the protests and unite the struggles of the unemployed township poor and the working poor into a political alternative that can begin to challenge the dominance of the ANC. At the birth of the new social movements in 2001, Ashwin Desai noted that activists “have raised, but not yet answered, the question of what organization/s will best serve the growing dissent.”95 Autonomist politics from the global anticapitalist movement have blown like leaves on the wind into South Africa, and many in the new social movements, understandably repelled by Stalinist and formalistic party politics, have long been reluctant to discuss or propose forms of collective organization that could begin to build this bridge and provide civil society activists with a practical, strategic, ideological, and educational form—that is, the notion of some type of party or other collective organization as a political home that is open to individuals to enter (rather than restricted, as today’s social movement networking is, to representatives of groups). We would argue that such a vehicle is needed to further develop the cracks and fissures in the ANC monolith and to begin to constitute a political community that explicitly seeks to transcend particularistic identities while supporting and building on the struggles they generate among the working class.