Black workers in S. Africa demand more than 'reform'

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1 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 1986 Bending to pressure from the inter -national anti-apartheid movement, the South African government has announced the end of several key laws that restrict where Black people can live and work.

The "reforms" were announced only a week before the May 1 deadline set by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). At its founding convention last November, COSATU had called for mass strike action and civil disobedience if the government refused to abolish its hated pass restrictions.

Under the new ruling, the green reference books that Black people have had to carry under penalty of arrest will be replaced by identity cards similar to those carried by whites. The new passes will continue to in -dicate the bearer's race, however.

The Population Registration Act, under which the population is divided into cat -egories of Black, Indian, coloured, or white will remain on the books. Segregation will still be maintained in housing and education; Black people must reside in officially designated Black townships. And the government has said nothing about giving Black people the vote.

The United Democratic Front (UDF), the country's largest anti-apartheid coalition, denounced the government's new "reforms" as merely cosmetic. "Our position is that apartheid cannot be reformed," said Patrick Lephunya, a UDF spokesperson. "It must be eradicated."

It is helpful to look at the background of the South African struggle to see why the regime has now been compelled to offer "reforms." To this purpose, we are reprint -ing the following contribution by Charlie Van Gelderen, a long-standing activist in the South African freedom struggle. The article is abridged from the March/April 1986 issue of International, a magazine published in Great Britain.

The picture emerging from South Africa is a contradictory one. On the one hand, the regime has been doling out the minimum of reforms. On the other, it has strength -ened the apparatus of repression.

While the media headlines have concen -trated on the battles in the townships and the growing influence of the African National Congress (ANC) and the UDF, the real source of the developing struggle has to be sought elsewhere.

With the suppression of the national liberation movement after 1963 and the economic boom of the years 1963-73, the regime had a decade of relative political tranquility...All this was to change in the decade that followed. The initiative passed from the ruling class to the masses.

The victory of Frelimo in Mozambique, the collapse of Portuguese rule in Angola, and the successes of Mugabe's guerrillas in Rhodesia [Zimbabwe] gave a tremendous boost to the self-confidence of the masses in South Africa. The whites were not invincible.

South Africa's capitalism was stronger and its armed forces more powerful than its neighbors' to the north. But the very growth of South African capitalism, its ra -pid expansion during the boom years, had produced its gravedigger—the Black prole -tariat.

The wave of strikes that began in Durban at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973 marked the rebirth of the Black inde -pendent trade-union movement in South Africa. Starting spontaneously as strikes for higher wages to meet the sharp rise in prices caused by the world economic crisis of the late 1960s, it was not long before the need for organization began to emerge.

Born in combat, the fledgling unions overcame the restrictions of government BY WALLACK FUR IME BOSTON HERALD S.AFRICAR REFORMS legislation. Firmly rooted on the shop floor, the unionized workers were also able to give cohesion and leadership to the struggles of students and the petty bourgeoisie. These struggles began to wrack the townships and culminated in the great Soweto uprising of 1976.

Workers in the lead This explosion of working-class power, culminating in the unification of most of the major union federations and some unaffiliated unions (in COSATU in November 1985), has inevitably made its mark on the political organizations engaged in struggle against the apartheid state.

The ANC, UDF, and AZAPO (Azanian People's Organization) all refer to the "leading role of the working class," al -though in the case of the ANC and the South African Communist Party this ap -pears to be merely a recognition of workers' numerical weight in the population.

But once the working class enters the political scene, it adds its own imprintspecific working-class, anti-capitalist demands. And it does this while supporting the struggle for national liberation and for elementary democratic rights as incor -porated in the Freedom Charter [a program first put forward by the ANC and other organizations in 1955] and in the manifestoes of the National Forum, AZAPO, and others.

One of the factors that has prohibited the majority of trade unionists organized in the major unions from affiliating to the UDF is the fear of losing one of their greatest gains-workers' control.

Most of the unions are organized with effective shop-floor control over the leadership. The constitution of the UDF—in which every affiliated organiza -tion has one vote whether it be a small community group or one with a mass base-seems to workers to counteract this principle.

Hence, Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary of the powerful National Union of Miners, in his keynote address to the opening of COSATU's founding conference, stressed that while COSATU must contribute to the liberation struggle it must not be "at the expense of building up support in the factories." He went on to say that it was "vital to ensure that whatever alliances are struck with political movements are made on terms favorable to workers."

The unions have in many cases gone beyond the immediate program of the Free -dom Charter and put forward transitional demands that challenge the hegemony of capitalism in the workplace. Thus, in the dispute between OK Bazaars and CCAWSA (Commercial, Catering, and Allied Workers Union of South Africa) and that between Foshini and the same union in 1985, the workers forced the employers to open the books to disclose financial information.

Management has also been challenged successfully on the right to hire and fire at will. Thus, Coca Cola was forced to reduce the number of planned layoffs from 203 to 63.

Independent political action

At the first meeting of the Central Executive Committee of COSATU, held in February, the new confederation once again distanced itself from any of the existing political movements. It resolved that "COSATU would not affiliate itself to any political organization so that it can maintain an independent political position."

This is not, of course, a repudiation of politics or a retreat into economism or syndicalism-as some critics of the independent trade union have maintained. It is a reiteration of the deeply held conviction that none of the existing organiza -tions-UDF, ANC, AZAPO, National Forum-give adequate expression to aspirations of the workers as a class.

This view, perhaps, was most clearly expressed in an interview with Moses Mayekiso, secretary of the Metal and Allied Workers' Union (MAWU) in the Transvaal, in the Socialist Worker Review last year.

"At present the FOSATU (Federation of South African Trade Unions, a predecessor of COSATU) shop stewards councils, and also MAWU, are discussing the political set-up. We are looking at the crisis and the solutions to the crisis. The general feeling is that the workers must have their own party and their own freedom charter. [For more information on this topic, see the interview with Mayekiso on page 7.] "The Charter (the Freedom Charter) is a capitalist document. We need a workers' charter that will say clearly who will control the farms-presently owned by the capitalists—who will control the factories, the mines, and so on. There must be a change of the whole society.

"Through the shop stewards councils people are opposed to the idea that there will be two stages toward liberation. That we must clean up capitalism first, then socialism. It's a waste of time, a waste of energy, and a waste of people's blood."

It is precisely this issue of workers' control-on the nature of the class that will take power in South Africa when the hated apartheid regime is finally over -thrown-that is the subject of debate in the working class and liberation movements Nothing short of a system of government in which the people have not only the right to elect their representatives but the right to recall them if they should prove unsat -isfactory will satisfy the workers of South Africa. This has been learned from building their own organizations; the working class will not accept less from the state that they help to bring into being.