tactics. The mobilising model, however,
makes mobilising the centrepiece of the
movement’s power strategy in a way that
displaces organising. It tends to reduce
the life of the movement to rallies and
meetings attended by a self-selecting
group of dedicated supporters. But even
this dedicated core participates only
minimally in formulating and executing
strategies. The mobilising model
concentrates power in the hands of staffers
and professional activists who “direct,
manipulate and control the mobilisation”.
They come to see themselves, rather than
ordinary people, as the key agents of
change.
Democratic organisation
In No Shortcuts, McAlevey traces the
mobilising model’s rise to dominance in
US civil society. Parts of this story would
be familiar to the South African Left: its
central thread is the de-radicalisation
and bureaucratisation of the labour
movement over the post-War period.
The effects have been terrible.
Nowhere has the mobilising model been
able to replicate even a fraction of the
successes achieved when
deep organising was the
guiding maxim of labour.
The validity of the
deep organising model
derives from certain basic
facts about capitalism as
a social system. Under
capitalism, the two sides
of the class struggle
fight with very different
“power resources”. Elites
control institutions, the
media, the economy.
Working people have only
numbers on their side.
But the structural forces
of capitalism alone don’t
grant us those numbers.
No amount of misery
inflicted by the market
will guarantee that
workers respond through
collective action. That’s
because there are always
other, individualist,
means of resisting and
getting by that don’t incur the same risks
and sacrifices.
It’s for this reason that we need
not simply organisation, but democratic
organisation. Only by showing ordinary
people the power they themselves
possess, and making them directors of
their own quest for justice, can we build
the cultures of militancy and solidarity
needed to weather the ebbs and flows of
the political process.
Democracy is power, and the Left
rarely gets far unless it realises this.
The South African Left has been no
exception. Indeed the labour movement
here was midwifed by a political tendency
that was particularly extreme in the
extent to which it stressed organising
over mobilising.
Breaking with earlier practices,
the post-1973 generation of unionists
eschewed party-based defiance
campaigns. Their approach was
shopfloor-centric. They organised around
workplace grievances rather than political
demands. And they used democracy as
a defensive tool. A movement reliant on
charismatic leaders or outsider activists
would be constantly vulnerable to
decapitation by the authoritarian state.
To survive it had to be rooted in ordinary
workers and capable of constantly re-
generating new activists.
These strategies paid off. Unions
sprouted and gradually expanded
throughout the latter half of the 1970s.
In 1979, the Federation of South African
Trade Unions (Fosatu) was formed,with worker control enshrined into its
constitution and baked into its political
identity.
Mistakenly in my view, Fosatu
turned the tactical expedient of political
independence into a principle. But this
stance was soon overtaken by events on
the ground. Community mobilisation
against apartheid revived rapidly from
the early 1980s, and organic ties betweenneighbourhood and shop steward
committees proliferated. With them
grew bottom-up pressure for unions to
get more directly involved in political
struggles.
These budding alliances were put
to their most trying test in the massive
Vaal stay-away of 1984, involving
around half a million workers – by far
the strongest such action in the 35 years
that stay-aways had been used as a
“political weapon”. Decisive to its success
were the ironclad shopfloor structures
painstakingly assembled by Fosatu unions
over the previous decade.A lost tradition
The tragedy of the South African labour
movement, which we are currently living,
is its failure to keep alive these traditions
of worker democracy and social movement
unionism in a political environment
transformed by democracy and
globalisation. That story is too multisided to
fully unpack here, but at its centre was the
union’s unhealthy entanglement with the
party that has sat in power for the entirety of
the democratic period.Its failure to maintain organisational
and political autonomy meant not only that
Cosatu was unable to resist the ANC’s drift
to the right. It also became an accomplice
to the giant systems of rent-seeking and
patronage that eventually engulfed the
“party-state”. The first casualties of this
were the traditions of democratic organising
that had brought the labour movement to
life and seen it through its toughest battles.Decisive to the success of the massive Vaal stay-away of
1984 were the ironclad shopfloor structures painstakingly
assembled by Fosatu unions over the previous decade.Perspectives for the left