Union leaders fight each other instead of the capitalists and their government
Introduction to the series
The scenes at the Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu)’s 15th congress, scheduled for 14–17 September, were both alarming and bewildering. For the first time in Cosatu’s 40-year history, the congress collapsed on its second day. Yet the full complement of delegates and affiliates in good standing was present, meeting the constitutional requirement for a quorum. Despite this, the media — echoing the leadership — portrayed the adjournment as the result of a failure to quorate.
This explanation confuses cause and effect. The congress collapsed over a political question: the impact of the SACP’s decision to contest elections independently. The SACP leadership has deepened the confusion by refusing to resign from its ANC positions, even though contesting independently means, by definition, contesting against the ANC. It acknowledges that the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) is not a socialist programme yet continues to pledge allegiance to the NDR — a programme that is capitalist by definition — while accusing the capitalist ANC of abandoning it.
Scope of this series
This series examines:
- The events at the congress in the context of the political situation and the state of the class struggle in SA and internationally.
- The theoretical and historical roots of the SACP’s degeneration, and its central role in the crisis facing the working class.
- The contradictions of the NDR and their impact on Cosatu.
- A platform and programme of action for a Socialist Confederation of Trade Unions.
Cosatu’s loss of political authority
Numerically, Cosatu remains the largest trade union federation, despite the expulsion of the National Union of Metal Workers of SA (Numsa) in 2014 and the emergence of the SA Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) in 2017. But Cosatu’s strength has always depended less on numbers than on its political authority within the wider working class and society. In the 1980s, that authority enabled it to function as a virtual workers’ party. That authority has now all but collapsed.
The crisis of 2014 anticipated the crisis of 2026. However, its deeper roots lie, first, in the political trajectory onto which the SACP leadership persuaded Cosatu’s leadership to place the federation in Lusaka in 1985; and, second, in Cosatu’s subsequent tactical and strategic incarceration in the Tripartite Alliance in 1990. If Cosatu was placed on political and ideological probation through its unauthorised baptism as a “congress” formation in Lusaka, it graduated into the class-collaborationist prison of the Tripartite Alliance in 1990 as a voluntary inmate.
Irreconcilable class interests
The Alliance contains an inherent class conflict. It is based, on the one hand, on the capitalist social forces the ANC represents; on the other, on the working class represented by Cosatu. These interests were bound, in time, to reveal their irreconcilability and rupture the institutions designed to contain them. The Marikana massacre was the defining event that laid bare this irreconcilable antagonism.
Cosatu’s successive convulsions in 2014, 2022 and 2026 — anticipated in a distorted form at the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane conference — set in motion successive political reconfigurations. The collapse of the 2026 Cosatu congress is the latest expression of that process.
A leadership detached from workers’ immediate struggles
These events are unfolding while workers reel under a rising cost-of-living crisis, including increases in the cost of fuel, paraffin, transport, basic food, interest rates and electricity. Instead of announcing support for Saftu’s Jobs Bloodbath Campaign, or for the Pay the Grants campaign to reinstate the Social Relief of Distress grant for millions government has disqualified — despite court rulings in favour of reinstatement that the government has appealed against — the congress descended into chaotic factional warfare.
The way forward
As this series argues, the congress is likely to reconvene and Cosatu will in all likelihood survive its near-death experience organisationally. But none of the underlying ideological and political questions will be resolved merely by reconvening.
Only by reasserting its class, ideological and political independence can the working class reclaim the role it played through Cosatu in the 1980s. What was then a virtual workers’ party must become a real mass workers’ party on a socialist programme, uniting:
- The workplace under a Socialist Confederation of Trade Unions.
- Communities under a United Socialist Civic Federation.
- Women under a Socialist Women’s Movement.
- Students and youth under a Marxist Youth and Student Movement.
Towards the 110th anniversary of the October Revolution
The approach of the 110th anniversary of the October Revolution in 2027 provides an opportunity to link the political questions examined in this series to the practical tasks of rebuilding working-class organisation. The lessons of 1917 bear directly on the crisis confronting the working class today: the necessity of political independence from the capitalist class, a socialist programme and a revolutionary party rooted in the struggles of the working class and capable of uniting the oppressed behind it.
We propose that the Workers’, Women’s, Community, and Student and Youth Platforms provide a basis for a programme of political education, campaigning and organisation in preparation for the anniversary. Beginning in October 2026, discussions of these platforms should identify common demands, develop programmes of action and build democratic structures through which workers, women, communities, students and youth can organise their struggles. An annual review each October would assess the organisation built and struggles undertaken, draw out their lessons and hold leadership accountable to the membership.
PART 1
FIRST INSTALMENT
The political context of the congress collapse
The collapse of Cosatu’s 15th national congress underlines the depth of the federation’s degeneration. The Cosatu of today is a pale shadow of the giant born over 40 years ago — the most powerful, militant and ideologically radical workers’ formation in SA and arguably African continental history. Cosatu’s early history, however much it has been contaminated by the leadership’s subsequent degeneration, remains the reference point for the best traditions of worker control, democracy and socialism of the SA working class.
From the standpoint of the working class, the Cosatu congress’ collapse could not have occurred at a worse time. The SA capitalist class and their political representatives in government have united and embarked on an offensive against the working class on multiple fronts of service delivery, education, health, housing, living standards and workplace rights.
In addition, under the cover of maintaining law and order, the state has provided legitimacy to organisations inciting xenophobia. Xenophobia serves as a distraction from and a cover to conceal the government and the capitalists’ culpability for poverty, mass unemployment, collapse of services and crime. It has in effect resuscitated the apartheid tactic of divide-and-rule. Inevitably, xenophobia’s blood relatives, racism and tribalism have followed in its wake. This is why unapologetically xenophobic parties that support Trump’s authoritarian mass deportation policies and Israel’s genocide in Gaza like the Patriotic Alliance have been invited into the Government of National Unity.
The accommodation provided to these right-wing formations has emboldened equally repugnant racist formations like Lex Libertas founded by former Solidarity Movement member and Afriforum deputy CEO Ernst Roets. They have crawled out of the sewer of apartheid appealing directly to the Trump regime to support greater recognition of Afrikaner cultural autonomy in a “Washington Memorandum” submitted by the Solidarity Movement. They have secured the official support of US president Trump for spreading the dangerous and provocative myth that black people are carrying out a genocide against whites – a reckless incitement of racial antagonism.
The international context
The congress collapse has, moreover, taken place against the background of the worst crisis of capitalism globally since the 1930s. The convulsions of this period of capitalism’s death agony are shown by the US’s insolent use of its military machine — the most lethal in human history — to cow countries into submission through state terror. It commits war crimes off the coast on the seas of South America and the Caribbean.
This is also shown by its provision of arms, financial aid and diplomatic cover for the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza, the wanton destruction and mass killings in Lebanon and the West Bank, its direct interference in elections in South America where it has established a Shield of the Americas alliance of far-right regimes. Globally Trump has provided a point of reference for the far right, fuelling xenophobia, racism, misogyny and religious bigotry and providing a diversion from the capitalist class’s responsibility for the economic crisis that the world has not recovered from since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.
What has thus followed is an escalation of the orchestrated assault on social democratic rights won in the advanced capitalist countries and the political rights and formal independence won in the neo-colonial world after World War 2.
The domestic context
In SA, the dreams of post-apartheid democracy lie shattered under a mountain of poverty, mass unemployment and the world’s greatest inequality. In a combined offensive, the capitalist class and their government have plunged the working-class majority and increasingly sections of the middle class into destitution with its neo-liberal weaponry of austerity.
To weaken the ability of the working class to resist, the bosses and the government have set about the systematic dismantling of the defences of the organised working class by rolling back the gains of labour law.
- The enforcement of compulsory strike ballots is an attempt to cripple the right to strike.
- This was followed by the attempted emasculation of collective bargaining in the infamous public sector wage theft of 2020 legitimised by the most strident anti-working-class ConCourt judgment since 1994.
- In the latest offensive, the Government has bent the knee to the bosses’ demands to amend the Labour Relations Act to weaken workers’ rights against unfair dismissal and unfair labour practices.
This offensive is the ruling political and economic elite’s response to the disastrous crisis in SA whose economic growth has averaged no more than 1% for a decade and a half. The government has itself abandoned the economic growth target of 5.4% per annum for ten years consecutively in the 2012 National Development Plan to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030.
These developments are a warning to the working class of the depths the ruling class and their governments are prepared to sink so that they can turn the working class against each other in defence of their system.
The Cosatu leaders’ conduct, as workers face an onslaught in the class war, is the military equivalent of violations of the rules of war. The rank-and-file would have been entitled to court-martial the officers for what amounts to deserting their posts, and turning their guns on each other in the face of the enemy.
The second instalment of Part 1 examines the congress deadlock, the political roots of the factional conflict and the prospect of a split.