Читать книгу New South African Review 2 - Paul Hoffman - Страница 21

Cosatu’s criticisms of the ANC and the SACP, and its explicit flirtation with organisations of civil society to the left of the ANC, suggested a return to a more robust, independent social movement unionism. This provoked an unprecedented backlash from its alliance partners, with the SACP openly criticising Cosatu for the first time.

During 2010, Cosatu increasingly raised the question of Nzimande’s being in government (as minister of Higher Education) and consequently neglecting his SACP duties. According to Vavi, this is not a personal issue but rather ‘a political difference between Cosatu and the SACP in relation to whether it is correct to have amended the constitution of the SACP to allow a general secretary to hold a full-time position in Cabinet’ (SABC News online, 1 May 2011). At the Wits University Ruth First memorial lecture on 17 August 2010, Vavi, reflecting on the social crisis facing the country, declared that Ruth First would have asked where her South African Communist Party was, and why it had not led ‘a united working class in a struggle to change the direction we seem to be taking’ (Vavi, 2010).

Later, Cosatu would more specifically call on Nzimande to leave government and focus on his SACP duties, even offering to pay him a minister’s salary. This angered the party, which felt it was an insult to suggest that Nzimande was in government for the money, a sensitive point, given the outcry in 2009 when Nzimande was one of the ministers who spent R1.2 million on a top-of-the range German car.

By late 2010, it was speculated that Vavi himself, who had withdrawn an earlier commitment to leave Cosatu and make himself available for a top position in the ANC at its 2012 national conference, would instead offer himself for the leadership of the SACP (even though he has no profile within the party, and has not himself indicated any interest in becoming leader). This expressed a hope amongst some unionists and SACP members for a renewal of the SACP as a more robust champion of the working class, capable of uniting the broad left.¹²

In late October 2010, Cosatu, in conjunction with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and civil rights group Section 27, held a civil society conference and did not invite its allies (except the South African National Civics Organisation (Sanco)) on the understanding that political parties were not part of ‘civil society’. The ANC and SACP were furious. Gwede Mantashe warned Cosatu against working towards ‘regime change’; the ANC’s National Working Committee (NWC) accused the gathering of attempting ‘to put a wedge between civil society formations, some unions, the ANC and its government’ (Cosatu, 2010c); and the SACP’s Jeremy Cronin (2010) suggested that Cosatu was falling into a ‘liberal’ trap to upset the NDR. Contrary to popular convention, Cronin defined ‘civil society’ as including the corporate sector; from his perspective, civil society was suspect, a terrain of anti-state, pro-market liberalism, and because the conference made no reference to the NDR, he proceeded to portray it as ‘anti-transformation’. While acknowledging that it would be ‘crass’ to suggest that those formations present at the conference were ‘simply imperialist agents’ or part of some ‘major conspiracy’, he warned Cosatu that ‘we need to be very careful that we are not manipulated into someone else’s strategic agenda, particularly when that agenda is itself increasingly hegemonised by a much more right-wing, anti-majoritarian liberalism’ (Cronin, 2010).

These harsh criticisms were followed in January by a cutting admonition of Cosatu’s criticism of government’s New Growth Path. Cronin accused Cosatu of ‘entirely missing the bigger picture’, and having a ‘redistributionist approach to transformation’ which, he implied, did not ask ‘what is right and wrong about our productive economy’. This ‘paradigm shift’, Cronin asserted, was implicit in the NGP’s emphasis on job creation (2011a).

Cronin seemed to ignore Cosatu’s substantial policy document on a new growth path, issued in September 2010. Far from being narrowly ‘redistributionist’, it is a far-reaching call for decisive intervention in the economy to steer it away from the minerals-energy-financial complex. These proposals were fully endorsed by the civil society conference,¹³ underlining its deeply transformative, progressive agenda. Indeed, Cosatu’s reservations about the NGP were that it did not take on board Cosatu’s proposals (Cosatu, 2011).

In an address to Barometer SA in March 2011, Vavi argued for a ‘radically different macroeconomic strategy, based, among others, on lower interest rates, a weaker rand, and more tariff protection for vulnerable industries identified by IPAP2¹⁴ and NGP as potential job drivers’. He also underlined the need for a ‘much bigger role to the state in directing investment into the sectors where jobs can be created’, including using state-owned enterprises to create jobs (Vavi, 2011).

Cosatu is clearly of the view that the NGP has not shifted government away from a neoliberal paradigm which contradicts the developmental goals set out in the NGP. Vavi asked: ‘Even the most developed countries are now abandoning this pro-market approach and taking quite drastic action to try to discipline the private sector, particularly the banks. How much more do developing countries need to build a strong, dynamic, but also democratic public sector and developmental state to drive the agenda of the NGP?’

Cosatu did not publicly attack Minister Ebrahim Patel, nor his ally the SACP’s Rob Davies (the minister of Trade and Industry and responsible for industrial policy). These two departments are clearly at odds with more conservative bureaucrats in the Treasury, which has constrained their more heterodox economic perspectives within a macroeconomic strait-jacket. Cosatu was appreciative of the fact that the NGP did contain progressive proposals for job creation, and that Patel’s department seemed to have won the battle to become the lead department in economic policy development. Cosatu’s difference of opinion with the SACP seems to lie in whether to knock quietly on the door of opportunity, hoping it will open, or to knock loudly, even threatening to break the door down, knowing that there are many on the other side who would rather keep it closed.