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ABSTRACT
The article provides a socio-historical account of worker education rooted in the African working class, and more specifically in the three competing strands within this tradition – the communist strand, the “workerist” strand and the “professional” strand – each linked to contesting definitions of workers’ education. It details the rich history of the first two strands, with their different origins in distinctive generational moments, and then moves on to the emergence of the professional strand in the post-democracy era where the labour movement’s new socio-political role is reflected in new education institutions. The different character of this newer tradition reflects the changing profile of trade union membership and a dominant emphasis on specialised training for leadership. The article ends by describing new initiatives in worker education which attempt to deal with the new challenges to the working class thrown up in the age of digitalisation and globalisation.
Acknowledgments
I would like to the acknowledge the role of the Chris Hani Institute in initiating this project and the very useful comments from the two anonymous reviewers.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I am using the term white labourism to refer to the movement that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century in South Africa of largely white English-speaking workers who defended their privileged position in the labour market and formed a labour party to defend the political interests of white organised labour.
2. I have not included in this paper the powerful Africanist and black consciousness traditions that led to the establishment of the Council of Unions of South Africa (CUSA) in 1980 and then the National Council of Trade Unions in 1986. For an excellent discussion of its educational approach conducted through the Urban Training Project and the Young Christian Workers (YCW), see Vally, Bafelo and Treat (Citation2013, 472–474).
3. I am using the word communist in a broad sense to include not only members of the Communist Party but also those who were expelled from the CPSA, such as Eddie Roux and Solly Sachs, and who continued to teach workers, as well as the Trotskyists, such as Max Gordon, who produced a series of worker education booklets, such as the Mayibuye Series with the South African Institute of Race Relations (Callinicos Citation1993, 166).
4. Subsequent research has traced the origins of the night schools to 1917 when Sidney Bunting and David Ivon Jones established night schools in the International Socialist League (Alexander Citation1999).
5. Although SACTU was never banned, iIn December 1961, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) was formed as the armed wing of the ANC. Some members of SACTU, such as Jacob Zuma, joined MK, increasing the hostility of the apartheid state towards SACTU, although it was never banned.
6. In my earlier work I referred to this tradition as the shop-floor tradition (Fine and Webster Citation1989, 257–258). Critical activists at the time, Alec Erwin (Citation2017) writes, saw these emerging unions as syndicalist in orientation or, in the 1980s, as “workerist.” Although it is not entirely satisfactory, I am inclined to agree with Byrne, Ulrich and van der Walt (Citation2017, 255) when they say workerism “serves as well as any other term to describe the main political current within FOSATU.”
7. Bonner went on to acknowledge that in stressing the failure of the ICU to organise the urban workers, he was failing to acknowledge their success as a popular rural social movement articulating the aspirations of farm tenants experiencing the dislocating effects of capitalist relations of production (Bonner Citation1978, 114).
8. “What was irksome for Biko was the way in which whites had taken class analysis as another avenue through which to take leadership and assume a superior position vis-à-vis blacks” (Macqueen Citation2018, 118). Interestingly, at the launch of Ian Macqueen’s book Black Consciousness on September 272018, Barney Pityana, one of the founding figures in the Black Consciousness Movement, reiterated his critique of the involvement of whites in the Wages Commissions, one of the early activities of the workerists.
9. Some decades after these events, I was interviewed by Michelle Friedman and asked whether this group of academics wielded power in the labour movement. “I believe not,” I said. “These freelance intellectuals did help define worker interests and clarify the direction of the union, but they did not have any organisational power inside the movement” (Friedman Citation2011, 98). Drawing on a distinction made by C. Wright Mills, by referring to “freelance intellectuals,” I was distinguishing between intellectuals such as myself and three other types of intellectuals in the union movement – professionals employed by the union such as economists and lawyers, union intellectuals made by the union, and party intellectuals made by the party (Webster Citation1992). Freelance intellectuals are not employees of the unions and neither do they have a direct organisational “foothold” in the union.
10. Elias Monage recalls participation in the Siyalala’s in the early 1980s: “We would call a siyalala and meet at the office on Friday night after work. We would talk all night and they were well-attended. The debate, the manner in which people conducted themselves was good. People were committed to this union” (quoted in Friedman Citation2011, 99). Note that siyalala is Zulu for “we are sleeping.”
11. Unless otherwise indicated, the information in this paragraph and the next one is taken from Webster and Englert (Citation2018).
12. The University Council terminated the contract with FOSATU on the grounds that the contract breached academic freedom, as it was only for FOSATU and not for any other trade union federation. Both the academics and FOSATU were outraged, as it was hypocritical of Wits, as they were running specific courses for Anglo American, and short-sighted, as Wits lost an opportunity to pioneer university-based trade union education in South Africa. The academics continued to teach the course off campus at St Peters in Rosettenville until 1985, when the initiative was terminated with the formation of COSATU.
13. Tshisimani is from a word in the TshiVenda language meaning fountain, spring or “at the water source.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Edward Webster
Edward Webster is Distinguished Research Professor in the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies and Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Witwatersrand. His research interests lie in work, labour and social inequality. He is currently completing a book length manuscript on Work in the Shadow of the Digital Age: does labour have a future?