The public sector strike victory has been won despite, not because of, the SACP, writes Peter Manson

As I write, the two-week South African public sector strike that has particularly hit schools and hospitals is on the verge of being settled. Over a million workers belonging to unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions have stood firm – a million more were to have been called out by Cosatu in solidarity action of general strike proportions from September 2.

Over the last few weeks the African National Congress government has been forced to up its offer of a 5.2% pay rise plus a monthly housing allowance of R500 (£44) to a “final offer” of 7% plus R700, which in turn was superseded by the latest increase, likely to be accepted by the unions, of 7.5% and R800 (£71). Although this falls short of Cosatu’s claim for 8.6% plus R1,000, it nevertheless represents a victory, considering that the rate of inflation stands at 4.5%.

According to public services minister Richard Baloyi, the previous offer of 7% would have forced the government to exceed its wage budget by R5 billion (£442 million). Now the overspend will be R6.5 billion (£574 million), a further blow to the government’s aim of reducing its budget deficit to below 5%. But the attacks on the working class and poor will now take another form, with the government promising yet more cuts and job losses across the board instead.

The bitter dispute has sent the ANC-led tripartite alliance (with Cosatu and the South African Communist Party) into its deepest ever crisis, with this popular front clearly split along open class lines: the ANC on one side, Cosatu on the other and the hapless SACP leadership attempting to bridge the gap, as it desperately tries to hold the popular front together.

The mass of workers, belonging to the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union (Nehawu) and the South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu), as well as several smaller unions, including the previously whites-only SA Teachers Union, displayed great militancy and determination. In several towns classrooms and hospital wards were closed by flying pickets and the media had a field day with allegations of violence and intimidation. It was claimed that hospital patients had died as a direct result of the strike. In one well publicised case hospital staff were said to have deliberately abandoned new-born babies, causing two to die of starvation.

Outside a Soweto hospital, the police fired rubber bullets and used water cannons against pickets. Rubber bullets were also used against striking teachers in KwaZulu Natal. Sadtu reported that one of its provincial secretaries, together with 50 other teachers, was arrested on August 23 while taking part in a peaceful picket.

Despite previous unsuccessful attempts by the Democratic Nurses Organisation of SA (Denosa) to agree emergency cover in the event of a strike, the unions tried to provide skeleton staffing in many hospitals. However, as Denosa points out, lack of equipment and chronic understaffing often makes even emergency treatment near impossible under normal circumstances.

As well as using its police to attack pickets, the government adopted a number of other measures in its attempt to defeat the strikers. The ANC sent army medics into hospitals and called for “volunteers” from the public. The former liberation fighters of the South African National Military Veterans Association issued a statement condemning “the abuse of the right to strike by some elements” and claimed: “The conduct of some of the strikers is worse than what soldiers are allowed to do in a war situation.” The association made an open call for its members to scab.

State bodies won a high court interdict against strikes by “essential” workers, including prison wardens, police and healthworkers. Although some smaller unions complied with the back-to-work ruling, most simply ignored it. The government threatened action against individual workers who continued to strike in defiance of the interdict.

But this only had the effect of strengthening the strikers’ resolve and encouraging others to join in. On August 24 the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union (Popcru) gave notice that it would join the strike and condemned the “usage of batons, rubber bullets, arbitrary detention, water cannons and other intimidatory methods employed by the state”. In an open call to mutiny, Popcru called on “all our membership to defy the improper instructions from their commanders, which are meant to injure the good cause we are fighting”.

The next day the South African Security Forces Union, describing its members as “workers in uniform”, called on the government to come up with “a proper offer” and declared: “The continual use of soldiers as scab labour in hospitals is not only unsustainable, but is parasitic.” It asked members to “engage in legal actions in solidarity”. The SA National Defence Union was also considering joining the strike.

Sections of the bourgeois media were not at all convinced by government attempts to defeat the strikes. The Times in Johannesburg, even before these statements from the police and soldiers’ unions, published a front-page editorial, “Pay our civil servants what they deserve” (August 19). It gave details of the derisory wages earned by public sector workers (although the examples chosen – police officer, state prosecutor and correctional services guard – are by no means the lowest) and contrasted their lot with that of president Jacob Zuma’s son, Duduzane – the latest to gain from a so-called ‘black economic empowerment’ deal struck by the state with a black-owned company.

With the media bemoaning the burgeoning “class war” waged between workers and the state, what was the position of the SACP? Well, its statements expressed mealy-mouthed “support” for the workers’ “legitimate” demands, but if strikers were hoping for a clear lead from the ‘workers’ party’ on how to seal their victory – forget it. There were no calls for comrades to stand firm, for others to join the solidarity action, for communists to show the way. Instead the SACP August 19 statement called on “all parties to immediately settle these strikes” and urged everyone to “reflect on the relationship between the developmental state and the workers, and the task of building a developmental public service”.

True, it declared: “For too long we have allowed capital to run scot free. The time is now to deepen our anti-capitalist offensive, including making sure that workers, the creators of wealth, share in the country’s wealth.” But that is as far as it went. By August 22 the party was more concerned that workers “avoid any acts of violence and physical intimidation”. It condemned the “life-threatening actions” and “acts of grave indiscipline” of healthworkers as “counterrevolutionary”, and labelled workers engaging in them “witting or unwitting agents provocateurs”, who “should be disciplined and if necessary expelled from their unions”. By contrast the SACP merely called on “our comrades in the police and other law enforcement agencies” to show “maximum restraint”.

Priorities

And there was no denying where SACP priorities lie: “Above all, we call on all of our formations not to play into a rightwing neoliberal agenda that seeks to break the organic and strategic unity between alliance partners, between organised workers and wider popular forces, and between unions and our democratic state. Instead of flinging irritable insults at each other, while the private sector and anti-worker elements sit back and laugh, let us, once more, forge a militant strategic unity within our alliance, and between government and the working class.”

On August 29 the SACP was still calling for a “very speedy resolution”, but now it advised the government to “set an example” to workers by agreeing “a collective moratorium on salary increases” for ministers and top state officials. Both government and unions need to “recognise, foster and affirm the professional vocational responsibilities of those in key sectors like healthcare, education and policing”.

Whereas in the private sector the battle is over “how to apportion surplus between profits and wages”, stated the SACP, in the public sector “the budget is predetermined and adjustments mean reallocating out of other priorities”. The solution? “Public sector wage bargaining should precede the passing of the budget, and we need to find means for doing this, which must also involve measurable commitments to enhanced productivity and public service.” Indeed the party was clearly hinting that the unions should agree to a strike ban for certain workers: “Another area that requires urgent attention is the effective definition of and consensus upon what constitutes ‘essential services’.”

What about the party leaders? SACP chair Gwede Mantashe occupies no less a post than ANC secretary general, in which capacity he called on “both sides” to “place a final settlement offer on the table, which they could accept or reject and revert to their previous positions”. But he warned workers: “The British National Union of Mineworkers had a year-long strike in 1984. That was the start of the end of that union.”

Jeremy Cronin, the deputy transport minister and SACP deputy general secretary, bemoaned the fact that the strike was “having a strain on the alliance” and making the government “appear bad”, while general secretary and higher education minister Blade Nzimande was too busy trying to minimise disruption at universities and colleges to say much.

The comrades of the Young Communist League, on the other hand, did not quite understand the need for restraint and conciliation. Unlike its parent body, the YCL condemned the police shooting of workers as “highly unacceptable and barbaric”, reminiscent of “apartheid-style tactics to suppress or intimidate workers” and “in total contravention of our constitution and workers’ right to take mass action in their struggle for a decent living wage and better working conditions” (August 19).

On August 22 it was furious at the government’s use of the courts: “We view this as antagonistic and affirmation that the state still serves and protects class interests of an elite few to the detriment of our people”. And the YCL’s Gauteng region went further: it was “not surprised that the capitalist state resorts to using its repressive apparatus to counter the genuine demands as tabled by organised workers”. It went on: “The attempts to sow divisions amongst the working class by the capitalist state must be vehemently condemned. The manner in which this government is acting is in no way different to the way the apartheid state drove a wedge between unions and community organisations during stayaways at the height of the struggle against apartheid.” Responsibility “should be placed squarely on the shoulders of a government that refuses to jettison its capitalist and anti-poor policies” (August 24).

More “irritable insults”, I suppose.

The SACP’s back-handed scabbing was not lost on Cosatu leaders, including its general secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi, himself an SACP member. He said Cosatu was “extremely unhappy” that communist leaders were “preoccupied” with their positions in government instead of doing the work of the party. Directly contradicting SACP policy, comrade Vavi announced on August 26 that Cosatu was no longer prepared to offer blanket support to ANC candidates. In next year’s local elections, “We will refuse to campaign or support candidates known to be thieves or lazy.” Not exactly a clear class line, but at least it is a start.

It goes without saying that Vavi and other top Cosatu bureaucrats are not above criticism themselves. It seems that before the initial one-day walkout on August 10 they had reached a tacit agreement with the government to accept a ‘compromise’ offer of 7%/R700, which the ANC promised it would make after the strike. But somehow the wires got crossed and the government jumped the gun and tabled the offer beforehand. This had the opposite effect to what was intended, with workers convinced that the full claim could be won if they stepped up their action. Comrade Vavi admitted that members had been “so angry”, they had told the leadership to insist on the whole 8.6%/R1,000.

On August 29, Zuma instructed his ministers to “return to the negotiating table immediately”. The next day the offer was increased to 7.5% plus a monthly housing allowance of R800. Cosatu immediately put the sympathy strikes “on hold” and called on public sector unions to put the new offer to the vote.

SACP soul

So there is no doubting that South African workers have won a victory. But surely this whole episode points once more to the glaring absence of a revolutionary workers’ party that could raise the sights of the movement beyond trade union demands, important though they are, to questions of the state and democratic workers’ power.

An estimated 70% of the population live under the official poverty line. Real unemployment stands at about 40% (the official rate is 25%) – one million workers lost their jobs in 2009, when the economy contracted by 1.8%. According to government statistics, 12 million people live in “informal settlements” – ie, they have no proper home. Capitalism cannot begin to provide solutions to these massive social problems, but the SACP insists that the alliance with the capitalist ANC is sacrosanct and the ANC-led “national democratic revolution” – whose 16-year progress since the end of apartheid has resulted in increased inequality – must continue. It is a “democratic revolution” without concrete democratic tasks. Where is the call for the abolition of the monarchical presidency, for recallable and accountable elected representatives paid only the average wage of a skilled worker?

There is still a big battle to be had for the soul of the Communist Party. Comrades must demand that the SACP and Cosatu break with the ANC and fight for the independent interests of the working class. Nzimande and Cronin, along with the two other SACP ministers, must immediately resign from the government or face expulsion.

Instead of locating this key struggle within the SACP, however, much of the far left demands that Cosatu breaks with both the ANC and SACP, as if there were no difference between the two. The Committee for a Workers’ International’s Democratic Socialist Movement says: “Take the federation out of the tripartite alliance prison” (in order to build a new “mass workers’ party”), while the Workers International Vanguard League refers to the “capitalist ANC-SACP”.

The WIVL anarchistically calls on workers, despite the absence of a revolutionary party, to “make this indefinite general strike real”. An indefinite general strike would immediately pose the question of power, but without a mass vanguard party to lead it and the ability to arm itself, our class would be crushed once it seriously challenged bourgeois rule.

The most militant sections of the South African working class continue to demonstrate their revolutionary potential, yet they still look to the SACP for leadership. And that is where the battleground is. There are no short cuts – there can be no revolution without a revolutionary party and there can be no revolutionary party unless battle is first engaged within the SACP.