Prefiguring democratic revolution? ‘Workers’ control’ and ‘workerist’ traditions of radical South African labour, 1970–1985

ABSTRACT

During the 1970s and early 1980s, sections of the trade union movement questioned the African National Congress (ANC) and South African Communist Party’s (SACP’s) narrow vision of freedom, which was based on the capture of the colonial state by a nationalist elite. Located within a distinct political current that prioritised participatory/direct-democracy and egalitarianism, workers were regarded as the locus of transformative power in society, and their organisations were viewed as prefiguring a radically democratic future. This article examines the very different kind of radical anti-colonial engagement offered by ‘workers’ control’ in the 1970s and ‘workerism’ in the early 1980s that was developed by the Trade Union Advisory Coordinating Council (TUACC) and the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), respectively. Keen to draw lessons for the trade union movement today, this article outlines the key characteristics and limits of these traditions that facilitated their decline in the post-apartheid context.

KEYWORDS:

• Workers’ control
• ‘workerism’
• unions
• national liberation
• apartheid
• South Africa
• TUACC
• FOSATU

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributors

Sian Byrne is an industrial sociology Ph.D. candidate at Rhodes University and a guest researcher at the Berlin Social Science Centre (WZB) with the Globalization, Work, and Production Project Group. Previously, she conducted much research on the current South African labour movement while working as a researcher linked to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). She is interested in studying work and labour, with a specific focus on labour politics from comparative and transnational labour histories perspectives. Her Ph.D. is a comparative historical study of labour politics in FOSATU (South Africa) and Solidarność (Poland) in the early 1980s.

Nicole Ulrich is a labour historian based at Rhodes University, South Africa, interested in the organisation, political ideas and identities of the labouring classes in Southern Africa. In addition to the radically democratic forms of organisation that emerged among organised workers in the 1970s, she researches the solidarities and broader transnational connections forged by slaves, Khoesan servants, sailors and soldiers in the early colonial Cape. She has been involved in the Workers’ Library and Museum, the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Centre for African Studies, University of Cambridge. Her work has been published, inter alia, in African Studies, the International Review of Social History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, New Contree and the South African Historical Journal.

Notes

1 Works committees were extremely limited, but were the only recognised structures that included representatives selected by African workers.

2 Gramsci (1968, 30) described them as ‘roughly equivalent to the shop steward committees set up in Britain during the First World War’.

3 Pat Horn remarked (retrospectively), that hearing about anarcho-syndicalism years later in Brazil ‘reminded me of our syndicalism of the early days’, but that it was ‘regarded as a circumstantial thing’, and that she ‘never read any syndicalist authors’ (Horn interview 2010).

4 For example, Pillay (2006, 171) suggests that ‘populists’ prioritised anti-apartheid struggle (ignoring capitalism), while ‘workerists’ prioritised anti-capitalist struggle (ignoring apartheid).

5 Joe Foster, FOSATU General-Secretary, speculated that this could comprise ‘trade unions, co-ops, political parties and newspapers’ (1982c, 6).