A-Infos (en) Southern African, Journal of Southern African Revolutionary Anarchism #8 - Now is the Winter of Our Discontent

SA Public Sector Strike Stokes the Fire of Popular-Class Unity and Reveals 
"Communist" Weakness by Michael Schmidt - Pictures by Lebohang Makwela
This year's giant month-long public sector strike was a remarkable demonstration 
of a convergence of working-class interests, across organisational, ideological, 
public/private, and racial lines ­ the likes of which has probably never been 
seen in South Africa before. ---- And it took place against a backdrop of an 
intense policy debate within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) alliance 
that has seen a go-it-alone faction emerge within the South African Communist 
Party (SACP) and a more strident independence take hold among the 1,8-million 
members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).

    By the time the dust had settled, had we
seen the emergence of true popular-class
consciousness among workers and the
poor?

THE FIRST SHOTS REVEAL CLASS DIVISIONS

    By the time Public Service Co-ordinating
Bargaining Council (PSCBC) talks got
underway in Pretoria at the end of
January, there were early warning
signs that the usual mid-year strike
season generated by negotiations
over wages and bread-and-butter
issues would develop into an
unprecedented conflict.
    It wasn't just that the government
was offering an insulting 6% across-
the-board wage increase that fell
pitifully short of the rise in the cost
of living with inflation running at 7%
1
   . This hardline stance is linked to
the government's neo-liberal orien-
tation, which stresses the need to
contain inflation and state spending,
inter alia, by capping public sector
wages and by locking state workers
into longer-term wage freezes.
    Tensions were initially raised by rumours
that chief government negotiator Kenny
Govender had not been properly mandated
by the Cabinet committee from which he
took his instructions ­ consisting of Public
Service and Administration Minister
Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Safety and
Security Minister Charles Nqakula,
Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota and
Finance Minister Trevor Manuel.
Govender denied the claim, but there had
been almost zero progress by the eve of
the strike on June 1. And the role and polit-
ical affiliations of the ministers pulling his
strings would be thrown into sharp relief in
the weeks ahead.
   The very first day of the strike, a single
incident of violence underlined some of the
most basic contradictions in the post-
apartheid political compromise: police fired
rubber bullets and teargas on strikers pick-
eting the Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town.
   Cosatu president Willie Madisha (who
was also an SACP Politburo member) and
SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande,
on hearing the news of the shooting at a
march        of   strikers   in    downtown
Johannesburg, roundly condemned it. But
so too, naturally, did a leader of the
Cosatu-affiliated Police and Prisons Civil
Rights Union (Popcru).
   This immediately revealed the raw sub-
structure of the conflict.
   Firstly, leading communists like Madisha
and Nzimande found themselves pitted
against a strike-breaking force headed by
Nqakula, who was SACP national chair.
This raised the question of whether the
SACP's attempt to sail with one foot in the
canoe of the masses and with the other
foot in the canoe of the state would not
result in the party doing the splits.
   Secondly, the state itself ­ which has
increasingly come under leftist scrutiny in
South Africa as an unelected counter-dem-
ocratic bureaucracy ­ was revealed as a
conventional capitalist employer that readi-
ly engaged in deliberate armed violence
against its own employees.
   Thirdly, the police themselves, accus-
tomed to their role as enforcers of
state/capitalist interests found their mem-
bers on both sides of the barricades, their
professional duties in conflict with their
needs as human beings. We would wel-
come the unionisation of the police - most
of whom are working class - over recent
years, if it had in any noticeable way
curbed police violence against the working
class. Sadly, this has not been the case -
as recent pre-emptive police gunplay
against legal pickets in the mining sector
has shown.
   The stage having been set and the battle-
lines so clearly drawn, the initially luke-
warm response to the strike (starting on a
Friday meant most workers simply took a
long weekend rather than join marches)
quickly developed incredible momentum.
THE PARTY'S PALE-PINK
CHAMPAGNE SOCIALISM
   The SACP had for some time been
undergoing a series of changes that had
shifted it away from its traditional Stalinism.
Those changes can probably be dated to
late leader Joe Slovo's think-piece Has
Socialism Failed? (1989), written in the era
of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and coin-
ciding with Francis Fukuyama's since-dis-
credited "end of history" thesis that claimed
liberal capitalism had triumphed as the final
mode of politics.
   Slovo's document, while reaffirm-
ing the validity of socialism in the
absence of the USSR motherland,
inexorably placed the party on the
path to becoming a conventional
parliamentary social-democratic
entity indistinguishable from similar
ex-Stalinist parties abroad, despite
its resistance to change its name.
   Fifteen years later, the party paper
Umsebenzi showed pretty girls
sporting party-branded T-shirts and
other gear up for sale. And as this
year's SACP funding scandal 2
revealed, the party has no restric-
tion whatsoever on businesses,
regardless of their motives, donat-
ing funds to the party coffers.
   More importantly, the party is deeply
divided, and does not - except on paper -
have any shared line . Some rank-and-file
members are old-school Stalinists while the
personal politics of its leaders veers
between mild social democracy to raging
neo-liberalism. Clearly the 1990s saw the
party floundering in the political wilderness
after the collapse of the USSR.
   In the final analysis, the party deferred its
own commitment to pursuing socialism
because firstly it mistakenly assumed that
the USSR had been "socialist" in the first
place (thus its vision of socialism was for-
ever tainted with the idea that it could be
enforced from above by state-capitalist
means). Secondly, its historical marriage
to the ANC's bourgeois-nationalist project
has undermined the party's inability to think
outside the very limited toolbox of national-
ist politics.
   It had become in very practical ways a
capital-friendly party that did not challenge
the structure of capitalism/state, but merely
proposed reforms that would see a partial
rechanelling of profit towards developmen-
tal ends. But this stance was increasingly
challenged by the SACP's refounded
Young Communist League (YCL), which
rapidly challenged older party conventions.
   By May last year, when the SACP
released its State Power Discussion
Document, the party had finally started to
grapple with the question of whether it had
been a good idea at all abandoning class
struggle in favour of a few seats for its lead-
ers at the bourgeois feast.
   The SACP correctly notes that the South
African state is Y-shaped: one arm services
the largely-white corporate oligarchy; while
the other under-services the largely-black
labour pool. Yet it still sees "capturing" that
state as the true role of a revolu-
tionary party. Although the party cri-
tiques the form of the state, it does
not critique its content as an
unelected, bureaucratic instrument
of elite rule over the popular class-
es. Unlike the party we recognise
that the state cannot be trans-
formed into a democratic instrument
designed to uplift the poor majority.
   In the party's draft programme The
South African Road to Socialism,
released ahead of its July party con-
gress, it honestly noted the errors of
Stalinism: "dogmatism, intolerance
of plurality, and above all, the cur-
tailment of a vibrant worker democ-
racy with the bureaucratisation of
the party and state. Millions of com-
munists were among the victims of
Stalin's purges". But this dodged
the question of honestly facing the class
character of the USSR by claiming it was
really "socialist" despite "errors".
   The draft later stated that "there is no sin-
gle road to socialism" and hailed the "role
of popular mobilisation rather than relying
solely on inter-state-driven reconstruction
efforts," and of the importance of "organs of
popular power" among the peasantry and
poor in driving a progressive agenda on the
African continent. But the progressive
nature of the party's continental aims are
vague at best and appear to be directed at
chanelling popular power into the narrow
purposes of African "developmental
states". This does little more than strength-
en class rule.
   "One thing is certain," the party wrote,
"the intensified class struggle that is appar-
ent across the length and breadth of our
society will be the decisive factor determin-
ing the outcome". But how much further
has the party advanced towards a pluralis-
tic worker-democratic vision?
   For one thing, the party has no class line:
the popular classes exist merely to bulwark
the "developmental state". Its vision is
blinkered by its slavish adherence to the
"need" for a strong state to "help weld
together a multi-class national democratic
movement buttressed by mobilised popular
and working class power". The party man-
ifestly fails to explain why the ruling class -
against all logic, against even the most
basic Marxist theory at that - can be "weld-
ed" into a multi-class project that benefits
the working class.
   In line with this crippled version of work-
ing class power, it comes as no surprise
that the party warns against "a syndicalist
or populist rejection of representative
democracy, or even of a respect for a pro-
gressive law-based constitutionality rooted
in social solidarity". What the SACP means
by "organs of democratic self-government"
is equally contradictory: "community polic-
ing forums, school governing bodies, and
ward committees". No autonomous popu-
lar-class organisations in sight. Everything
wedded to the capitalist state.
   Trotskyist labour analyst Terry Bell, one of
the rare pro-labour voices in the main-
stream press, said while Public Service
Minister Fraser-Moleketi was becoming
compared in her iron-gauntleted handling
of the strike to that other Iron Lady,
Margaret Thatcher, during her strike-break-
ing drive against the National Union of
Mineworkers in Britain in 1984, the real
Thatcherite was Finance Minister Manuel.
   Still, it is worth noting that Fraser-Moleketi
is yet another former communist who has
sneaked away from the party in recent
years. Never really involved in the struggle
for a democratic South Africa, she joined
the ANC while visiting Zimbabwe in 1980.
   Her Stalinist training ­ boot camp in
Angola, followed by an officer's course in
the USSR and unspecified "specialist"
training in Cuba ­ once again demon-
strates the very short distance, as the vul-
ture flies, between Stalinism and
Thatcherism/Reaganism.
   So it came as no surprise that this pale-
pink "champagne socialist" party found
itself a house divided against itself during
the public sector strike.

THE BATTLE IS ENGAGED: SOLIDARITY AND UNITY

   The strike generated intense interest
among trade union organisations abroad,
and the ZACF did its small bit in publicising
the strike and drumming up messages of
solidarity from the international anarchist
and syndicalist movement.
   The ZACF itself noted that earlier in the
year, the Independent (that is, state)
Commission for the Remuneration of
Public Office Bearers recommended that
President Thabo Mbeki get a 57,3% pay
increase, taking his total package from
R1,1-million to R1,8-million annually.
   Strikers carried placards saying "57,3%
good enough for Mbeki ­ good enough for
me". The fact that Mbeki rejected the com-
mission's recommendations during the
strike in an apparent attempt to pour oil on
the troubled waters does not disguise the
country's huge income disparities: while
members of Parliament argued they should
get salaries of R650,000 annually, a hospi-
tal clerk told us she fed five mouths with a
take-home salary of R12,000 annually.
            Support for the strikers' initial 12%
wage demand came from the anar-
cho-syndicalist      National
Confederation of Labour in France
(CNT-F) which condemned "the
South African government's attempt
to intimidate strikers into ending the
strike by issuing dismissal notices to
striking workers, and by using
apartheid-era       police     brutality
against picketers".
   Other organisations that sent mes-
sages of support via the ZACF
included      the    Federation       of
Anarchists of Greece (OAE), the
International Solidarity Commission
of the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW) and the Workers'
Solidarity Alliance (WSA) in the
United States. The International
Workers' Association (IWA) said it
would send a solidarity message
directly to the unions, although its affiliate,
the Solidarity Federation of Great Britain
(SolFed ­ IWA), sent a solidarity message
via us.
   The Melbourne Anarchist Communist
Group in Australia (MACG) issued a
detailed statement, noting: "The fact that,
even now, [June 19], the public sector
strike is not resolved is a demonstration of
the fundamental conflict of interests
between labour and capital. Regardless of
the outcome of this strike, while society is
divided into a working class and an
employing class, there can be no just and
lasting settlement to employment dis-
putes."
   The MACG endorsed "the right of picket-
ing workers to use reasonable force in self-
defence" ­ but as is usual, the red herring
of violence was raised in the mainstream
press and among the striking unions them-
selves, becoming a point of fracture in the
initially united front.
   That front embraced 17 unions represent-
ing Cosatu, the Federated Unions of SA
(Fedusa), and the black consciousness
National Congress of Trade Unions (Nactu)
­ together accounting for about 1,4-million
strikers ­ and about 400,000 independent
unionists.
    It was a remarkable coming together of
the three main union federations, usually
divided by their disparate ideologies into
respective ANC, liberal and black con-
sciousness blocs, plus the independents,
one of the strongest expressions ever of
multi-racial, yet single-class power in the
country's history. The strike did demon-
strate a significant amount of cross-racial
labour action, and probably quite unprece-
dented in scale, so on one level it was an
advance in class consciousness. But the
ideological grip of the ruling class - via the
ANC and via nationalist mythology -
remained pretty strong. These are uneven
advances.
    Before long, off-duty soldiers and naval
sailors ­ their members drafted in as scab-
labour to work in the hospitals and other
services ­ were joining pickets and march-
es. Bell told me that "irrational" wage dis-
parities in essential services such as nurs-
ing, police and defence were fuelling the
fire.
    A one-day sympathy strike was called on
June 13 and was well-supported. Public
sympathy, despite widespread anger at the
lack of service-delivery, was high.

THE CRACKS IN THE DAM

    By June 16, when labour had dropped its
demand to 10% and the government
moved to 7,25%, the united front was hold-
ing firm, and the average union member
appeared to be very well-versed in the
issues at play around housing allowances,
medical aid and so forth, despite Fraser-
Moleketi claiming union leadership was
keeping them in the dark.
    Several cracks had appeared around the
police use of force against strikers, the
intimidation of non-strikers, and what the
independents saw as the politicisation of
the strike by Cosatu ahead of the ANC's
crucial June policy conference and
December congress.
    Popcru's head of collective bargaining,
Alex Mahapa, told me that police members
were hotly debating whether officers'
orders to fire on strikers were legal orders
(strangely, while soldiers have a unique
code of conduct allowing them to disobey
illegal orders, there is no police corollary).
    The strike was largely well-disciplined yet
sporadic incidents of violence received
extensive mainstream media play.
Although it is a fundamental principle of
labour never to cross a picket line, the very
diversity of the striking unions created diffi-
cult conditions.
    For example, JR Pieterse of the conser-
vative teachers' SA Onderwysersunie said
though all teachers' unions were united by
their experience of similar poor levels of
pay and working standards, it had only
decided to embark on a one-day strike
while other unions voted for an indefinite
strike, raising tensions between the one-
day strikers and the rest and leading to
intimidation.
   Gavin Moultrie, president of the inde-
pendent Health & Other Services
Personnel Trade Union of SA (Hospersa)
said by June 16, the independents had
become disenchanted with what they saw
the abuse by Cosatu affiliates of the strike's
economic aims to push party-political
agendas relating to the various factions in
the ANC presidential race. Still, this would
not cause the Independent Labour Caucus
to break ranks, he said.
   Court actions started flying as labour and
government tried to see who would be the
first to blink: the Labour Court ordered the
120,000-strong Popcru to restrain its on-
duty police members from joining the strike
as threatened. But even the conservative
64,000-member SA Police Union (Sapu)
warned many of its members were threat-
ening a wildcat strike.
   By June 24, however, with government
having dug in at 7,5%, and with the ANC's
policy conference looming, the first unions
broke ranks: Fedusa affiliate Hospersa
announced it would sign the deal, with
president Moultrie saying he hoped to con-
vince Popcru, Sapu, the independent
Public Servants' Association (PSA), and
Cosatu affiliate the National Education
Health & Allied Workers' Union (Nehawu)
to join Hospersa.
   This would give it them the bargaining
council majority necessary for government
to enforce the agreement. Moultrie said he
felt by refusing to settle for 10%, the SA
Democratic Teachers' Union (Sadtu) was
"holding the other unions hostage". He
saw this intransigence as part of a cam-
paign to promote Sadtu president Madisha
for the ANC's National Executive
Committee in December.
   In part, the Fedusa capitulation was
revenge for a 1997 about-face by Cosatu
unions who had also capitulated at the last
hour, enabling the government to unilater-
ally enforce its will.
   But in reality, all unions admitted they
were at the mercy of their memberships
regarding whether to move or not. Even at
that late hour, it was a victory for the shop-
floor ­ especially given that few unions had
any strike funds at all, so strikers were real-
ly feeling the pinch.
THE AFTERMATH: SHOPFLOOR
WINS AND LEFTIST LOSSES
   By July 1, the strike was over. Business
Day reported the score-card as
"Government 2, Unions 1," though natural-
ly focused on the extra R5,5-billion ­ actu-
ally well affordable ­ that had been added
to the public sector wage bill. By compari-
son to Thatcher's crushing showdown with
the British National Union of Mineworkers,
which broke the back of British labour,
however, government had failed to break
the power of the unions and had been con-
fronted with an unprecedented level of
working-class unity, initially backed by wide
public sympathy.
   Although the closing days of the strike
revealed bitter divisions between Cosatu
and its traditional unionist rivals and public
sympathy waned 3, the unions held the line
for unusually long and robbed the govern-
ment of an easy victory. Hopefully the
pragmatic lesson learned of the power of
union solidarity will not be lost. And hope-
fully the syndicalist lesson of shopfloor
democracy won't be easily forgotten or
eroded either.
   The other good things that emerged from
the strike were the transformation of
Cosatu's weekly labour review into Cosatu
Today, hailed as the first working-class
daily "newspaper" since apartheid ended,
and the launch of the new progressive jour-
nal Amandla! which promises to be non-
sectarian.
   The MACG correctly urged "all workers in
South Africa to reflect deeply on the role of
the South African so-called Communist
Party. Communism has not failed. Rather,
the SACP has failed communism. Under
apartheid, the SACP taught that the work-
ers' struggle had two stages. The first
stage was the struggle for the establish-
ment of democracy, for the abolition of
apartheid and entrenched racial oppres-
sion.
   "The second stage, to follow at some
point after the establishment of democracy,
was the struggle for socialism. To the
extent that this was true, they deceived the
workers (and many of their own members)
by omitting to tell them that, in the second
stage of the struggle, the SACP would be
on the side of the capitalists!
   "The wretched history since 1994 of this
once-proud organisation can only be
understood as the penalty for its funda-
mental political errors. The liberation of the
working class itself cannot be delegated to
a political party." And, it seems that the
SACP seems doomed to repeat the mis-
takes of the past. This was evident at the
SACP's 12th congress, held in July.
   While a Markinor survey in mid-June dur-
ing the strike had shown 28% of South
Africans and 25% of ANC supporters
believed a new workers' party should be
formed to contest ANC dominance, and
while some party members have started to
seriously question the Alliance with the
ANC, the SACP avoided making any real
shifts. At its congress, party leaders neatly
deferred the decision on whether to contest
the 2009 elections as a self-standing party
with its own platform. However, as exam-
ples too numerous to spell out show ­
including the Workers' Party (PT) govern-
ment in Brazil ­ electoralist options seldom
represent true advances for the popular
classes.

OPPORTUNISM IGNORES GRASSROOTS STRUGGLE

   Why? The SACP's long tradition of loy-
alty to the ANC is a major factor. In a cut-
ting analysis, Dale McKinley of the Anti-
Privatisation Forum 4 argued that for the
past 15 years, the party had "fiddled" with
the issue of being junior partners in an
alliance with the ANC that they will clearly
never control. Their second option, was
never realised: "to go back to the basics of
organising and mobilising the poor and
working class (which must include real,
practical alliances with community organi-
sations and social movements) based on a
radical programme of demands for the
redistribution of wealth ..." This pro-
gramme should "re-build a genuine left
political and organisational power-base to
contest power relations within SA society
(something which is not simply reducible to
elections and running as an electoral force
separate from the ANC)".
   Rather than tackle the crisis in the party's
ranks, and in its direction, the congress
was dominated by the leadership squab-
bles in the ANC between supporters of
President Mbeki and his disgraced rival,
Jacob Zuma.5
   McKinley noted how the presidential lead-
ership battle between factions such as
those supporting Mbeki or contender Jacob
Zuma had come to not only dominate, but
in fact supplant real politics within the
SACP.
   "It is a sad state of affairs ­ a situation in
which the largest and most long-standing
`left' party in South Africa [the SACP] is
effectively held hostage to the outcomes of
personal/intra-organisational and patron-
age battles within another party [the ANC]
and, in which its own programme and poli-
tics is also effectively moulded by the same
battles".
   Sure, Minister Nqakula was ousted as
party national chair ­ but not because of
his politics but because he (supposedly)
represented the Mbeki faction. It was
telling, McKinley said, that Zuma was "nei-
ther a communist nor even socialist," but
rather an opportunist, so for Cosatu and
the SACP to claim there has been a shift to
the left both in the party and in the ANC is
patently false.
   Instead, the reality is the SACP and
Cosatu are confirmed in their roles as mere
handmaidens, forced to kowtow to the
usual old ANC dictates of strengthening the
Alliance (exclusively in its favour) and thus
endorsing the deferment of any true revo-
lutionising of the country's classist econo-
my. Here, too, we see the results of the
strike in terms of consciousness are limit-
ed. The energy and anger of the strike was
carefully dissipated into thin air by certain
union and SACP leaders.
   The result is that despite memberships of
14,000 and 1,8-million respectively, 6 the
SACP and Cosatu had been "virtually
nowhere" amidst the "hundreds of commu-
nity protests around basic services, crack-
downs by the state on these activists/com-
munities and efforts to influence local gov-
ernment delivery mechanisms and politics
to be more inclusive/participatory..."
   He explains why the SACP and Cosatu
approach to the radical social movements
have been so two-faced, making sweet
overtures the one moment, then decrying
them the next, instead of seeing them as
natural allies: they wish to "organisationally
control the social movements so that they
are not `anti-ANC' and also so that these
social forces do not pose any ongoing or
future threat to the `left' dominance of the
SACP/Cosatu and the self-annointed `left'
forces in the ANC/the state".
    We anarchist-communists work within
these social movements because they ­
and not state corporatist structures like
community policing forums - as the SACP
would have it ­ are true "organs of popular
power", for all their faults and inconsisten-
cies. In doing so, we work alongside all
true grassroots communists, however they
describe their traditions, who genuinely
support the organisational and ideological
autonomy of the popular classes (workers,
peasants and poor).
    We also encourage constructive debate
and engagement with SACP members
concerned at their party's surrender of a
class line in favour of the opportunistic pol-
itics of personality, and with rank-and-file
Cosatu members concerned at the stran-
gulation of the power of their class by the
ANC yoke.
    Only a consolidation of ethical, highly
politicised, forces of the productive base of
society and their reserves the poor can
hope to successfully challenge the
exploitative status quo. That is the lesson
of this year's strike: only politically-
mobilised class unity and shopfloor democ-
racy can change the structure of the
national economy in a way that puts the
opportunists and the parasitic elites they
serve to flight.

Notes:

1. CPIX inflation, which excludes mortgage costs
and is the main figure tracked by the Reserve
Bank for policy purposes, has been slightly lower
at about 6.4% - and when the strike started, it
was still lower, below the bank's 6% target ceil-
ing. On the other hand, food inflation is higher,
around 9% over the past few months. This, of
course, hits the working class disproportionately,
as Cosatu and others (even some bourgeois
economists!) pointed out during the strike.
2. In August, the Mail & Guardian wrote a story
saying R1,7-million was either missing from
party coffers or had not been accounted for
(including R500,000 allegedly donated by busi-
nessman Charles Molele, R600,000 apparently
given by ANC man Justice Pitso, R360,000 iron-
ically paid in error to the party by the Banking
Association, and R300,000 donated by the
Chinese Communist Party). Corruption by sev-
eral party leaders Madisha and Nzimande has
been alleged, but the matter has yet to be
resolved.
3. The public's primary concern became the
teaching time lost to Matric students, hundreds
of whom have violently protested at the prospect
of entering their final exams unprepared.
4. The "Zumafication" of Left Politics in the
Alliance: A Critical Review of the ANC Policy
Conference & the SACP 12th Congress,
Amandla                 online              edition:
www.amandla.org.za/Site/McKinley.htm
5. should read: Jacob Zuma's election as ANC
President at the party's congress in December
has been hailed as a victory for the Left by
Cosatu and the SACP ­ but Zuma has made it
crystal clear that he will not diverge at all from
the ANC's neo-liberal, anti-poor agenda. The
parliamentary Left has thus failed spectacularly
to shift government policy in a more humane
direction ­ but while the economic and political
superstructure remains unaltered, Zuma's elec-
tion shifts the social debate rightwards, in favour
of macho populism and perhaps even dangerously Zulu chauvinism.
6. There is confusion over the SACP's true membership. In May,
Nzimande c l a i m e d 40,000 members, and the July congress
was told there were 51,872 paid-up members. But treasurer
Phillip Dexter, suspended for railing against the party's
Stalinism, put the number at a more believable 14,000 (the
bigger numbers having apparently been reached
by simply adding the YCL's unproven and prob-
ably wildly over-inflated 20,000 members to
those of the parent party).

Note: The unity of the strike paid off in November with the merger of the 
formerly PAC-aligned, blue-collared National Council of Trade Unions (Nactu), 
with the formerly white - and white-collared - Federation of Unions of SA 
(Fedusa) to form a new labour giant, the SA Confederation of Trade Unions 
(Sacotu). With 890,000 paid-up-members (perhaps 1-million members in all), it is 
bigger than the ANC with only 621,000 paid-up members, but still lags behind 
Cosatu's 1,8-million. While broadly social-democratic in orientation, Sacotu is 
deliberately non-party-affiliated, a fact that is the major stumbling-block
to the much-desired merger with Cosatu to form a single national confederation.
   It remains to be seen whether Sacotu's "a-political" stance becomes with time 
reduced to mere economism, whether it dissipates its strength by backing a 
future labour party, or whether its struggles against ANC neo-liberalism take it 
in a more militant, autonomous class struggle direction.

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Extracted from: http://www.zabalaza.net/pdfs/sapams/zab08.pdf
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