In defence of South Africa’s working class

The official discourse tells us that apartheid was dismantled in 1994. In the period preceding the 1994 ‘miracle’ there were many strikes involving quite a number workers. This massive strike movement certainly contributed to the elimination of apartheid by bringing the white minority regime to a negotiating table with the liberation movement. Indeed the trade union movement was very close to the nationalist movement – COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) close to ANC (African National Congress) and NACTU (National Council of Trade Unions) close to PAC (Pan Africanist Congress). Strikes then were seen as the essential part of the liberation struggle.

The apartheid machinery was smashed and a new constitution entrenched in 1996, but strikes continued unabated. It is no top secret that in recent times the ANC-led administration has on many occasions come down heavily against the striking workers and their trade unions. It seems the allies of yesteryear were now seen as chasing away foreign economic investment, as ‘moegoes’ – as the Sunday World called the SAMWU (South African Municipal Workers Union) striking workers – for throwing dirt on the streets whilst on strike, jeopardising the World Cup, denounced as unpatriotic etc.

Clearly, the state could not tolerate such ‘insolence’ of the workers. These tend to paint the working class as the enemy of the nation. But this is not a South African story – it is an African story. Even the great Nkrumah of post-independence Ghana, in 1961 declared that ‘this is no time for unbridled militant trade unionism in our country’. In South Africa many laws have been promulgated to regulate strikes. In essence these laws are meant to regulate and institutionalise the class struggle that continues in the post-apartheid period.

Post-independence African states may be differentiated a great deal in their rhetoric, but there is one common denominator amongst them all: They fear the working class. The trade unions are always seen as political threat. The working class is seen as a threat to neocolonialism long before it has reached its class consciousness status. The metamorphosis of the working class as a class in itself into a class for itself is feared like a tsunami. According to elementary Marxism, classes become socially significant groups only when their members become conscious of their interests as a class and the opposition of these interests to the interests of the other class. In ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Marx had this to say of classes, in as far as ‘the identity of their interests begets no community no national bond and no political organisation among them, they do not form a class’. The class-consciousness is reached only when class contradictions become politicised. This consciousness expresses itself in a rather ‘confused’ and spontaneous manner – the smashing of machines in a factory, throwing garbage on the street, etc. It is from this point of view that the struggle of the working class in our society should be seen. These are the forms of expression that should radicalise the class contradictions and help make working class consciousness more articulate and expressly political.

EXPROPRIATION OF THE WORKING CLASS IDEOLOGY

When workers are striking they are always admonished rhetorically: ‘Against whom are you striking? After all we are comrades, the ANC government is government of the people’! If the working class and its leaders do not expose this ideological expropriation, they would be lending credence to the expropriation of their ideology to legitimise their own exploitation. This must be exposed in order to demystify the dominant ideology, which belittles and ceaselessly vilifies the role and place of the working people in South Africa.

UNEMPLOYMENT AND EMPLOYMENT

This is one of the problems acknowledged by government in South Africa. At every opportunity, the determination to solve it is proclaimed. But it is doubtful as to whether this is reflected in actual policies and at the operational level. The basics of historical materialism teach that the human being/social being is first and foremost a worker and work is the most fundamental activity of society. It is by work that the human being fashions the means to stay alive, reproduce his kind and achieve civilisation. Therefore we are as we work.

One is not really employed if one’s productivity or wage or return is so low that one is hardly able to reproduce oneself. Nor is one really employed in a job that offers hardly any room for self-development. This is generally the case in Africa and South Africa in particular, where the extremities of poverty usually lead to the conflation of employment with working or having a job (like someone who cuts alien trees under the Working for Water Programme) and the dismissal of the notion of decent, satisfying and creative jobs as esoteric irrelevancies. Legitimate expectations of material wellbeing of the people are now represented as naïve, subversive or as reprehensible profligacy. This also leads some people to overstate, in a most misleading way, the point that having a job at all constitutes a remarkable improvement on prevailing conditions for a lot of people of South Africa. The pitfall of doing this is that we trivialise the concept of unemployment and with that, its status as a real life problem. Moreover, if we are as we work, we cannot settle for a notion of the work process which offers only a horrible existence.

CAPITALISM AND UNEMPLOYMENT

Mother Nature did not create people with property and capital on one side, and people with nothing but their ability to labour on the other side of the ledger. It is capitalism that produces the workless person. This was created through human agency in a socio-historical process.

Unemployment is a by-product of capitalism; by definition the capitalist system needs an army of unemployed people to control wages and truncate trade union militancy. It needs unemployment during periods of economic boom so as to draw labour and to which it can throw out workers during periods of economic difficulty – as happened during the recession.

The unemployed end up in the economy of desperation (euphemistically called the informal sector). The informal sector is a manifestation of the problem of unemployment. The unemployed enter this sector of the economy when the choice is between worklessness and starvation. This is an expression of the resolute will to survive in the face of seemingly hopeless odds, viz. the lack of a buyer for one’s labour power and the lack of means of labour to realise it. This Darwinism is achieved through stretching creativity, stamina and patience to the outer limits:

- The creation of capital from nothing as in the case of the street seller at the school gate whose stock is a packet of sweets/biscuits sold singly
- The improbable feat of substituting labour power for means of production and hands for tools achieved by someone who collects from the garbage dump and recycle paper, tins, cardboards, plastic, etc.

This sector is characterised by minimal availability of capital and supporting infrastructure, maximum physical exertion, inhuman hours, and paltry returns for effort. The informal sector represents one of the most hostile and horrible conditions of realising labour power.

There is some perversity in the tendency to represent the informal sector as an optimistic development – hopeful in the sense that it reduces social tension, provides employment, encourages creativity and self-reliance, the diffusion of skills and reduction of waste in human and material resources. Admittedly, it does all these things to a certain extent. But we cannot take any comfort in its existence and its daily growth. It arises from misery. While it may help people to stave off starvation, it subjects them to unacceptable and inhuman conditions of work.

To sum up, the current discourse now proclaims the end of social conflict – ‘our country is alive with opportunities’ etc, and everyone should apply his mind to the task. It is argued that the urgent task is hard work, not self-extravagance. In effect the dominant discourse has reduced politics to administration in so far as issues regarding the paramount goals of society and the legitimacy o the existing socio-economic order. Indeed questions concerning the justice of existing order (capitalism) are not even tolerated. It seems order (read conformism) is more emphasised than questions of liberty.

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* Mxolisi Makinana is an independent researcher with an interest on human rights, international criminal law, organised crime, terrorism and money laundering in the southern African region.
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