Ironically, since predictions that poverty and inequality in South Africa will prompt a social convulsion are a routine feature of the national debate (Mbeki 2011), the recession which followed the global financial crisis has been remarkable more for what it did not bring than for what it did. While it was widely seen as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and in South Africa cost hundreds of thousands of jobs (Nxumalo 2009), it did not trigger organised mobilisation by working people and the poor for a new economic order. While grass-roots protest in the townships and shack settlements where the black poor live has been a constant during this period, it is unrelated to the economic crisis – it predates it and is directed at local governments rather than economic power-holders. Engagement between the African National Congress (ANC), which has governed since democracy's advent in 1994, and its trade union and South African Communist Party alliance partners', was a far more visible response to economic crisis than mass mobilisation behind an economic alternative.
The lack of a sustained challenge to the current distribution of economic power is not an accident but is a consequence of structural changes in the conditions under which the poor organise. While the future contours of organisation for redistribution remain unclear, it is now evident that the ‘classic’ form of organisation by the poor, the labour movement (Piven and Cloward 1979), is no longer able to play the role it once did as the leading agent of redistributive politics. The trade union movement remains the largest organised interest in South Africa, but it has little or no presence among the growing number of poor people outside the formal economy.
This limitation on the trade union movement's reach reduces its bargaining power, and partly explains its failure to win economic policy changes from a governing party which is formally allied to the country's largest trade union federation. This in turn begs a key question – whether, given the limits on trade union capacity to lead the poor in the quest for a more equitable social order, South African social movements, which do organise outside the formal workplace, might be able to step into the breach to play the leading role in organising campaigns for redistribution once played by unions. This article will argue that social movements are unable to play the role once played by unions and that they are not equipped to lead an effective campaign for the redistribution of power and resources. But it will argue also that the limited social power of unions means that a new synergy between trade unions and social movements is the likeliest route to sustained collective action by the poor and formal workers in support of redistributive goals.
Limits on labour
In South Africa, as in any other society with a significant industrial base, redistributive politics was historically led by labour (Friedman 2002). The beginning of the demise of the apartheid system can be traced back to 1973, when black workers in the port city of Durban struck for higher pay (Friedman 1985). While the 1976 rebellion in the Soweto township is often seen as the beginning of the wave of resistance which was to defeat minority rule, it was the strikes which, over the ensuing decade, triggered the growth of a trade union movement which became not only the largest and most organised vehicle for collective action by black South Africans but also became a social movement committed to a thoroughgoing redistribution of wealth and power. Attitudes among union members are, surveys show, more militant in their expectations of change than that of other citizens (Charney 1995). Currently, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), South Africa's largest trade union movement and an ally of the governing ANC, is the most consistent voice in support of redistribution.
The influence of trade unions, in South Africa as in other industrial economies, was possible because poor people were concentrated in mass production workplaces in which collective action was much easier and workers had considerable bargaining power if they organised because they could withdraw their labour. In western Europe, this favourable environment for organisation produced labour movements and parties which formed alliances with other social strata which labour, by virtue of its numbers and capacity for organisation, invariably led (Przeworski 1985). In South Africa, the largest industrial base on the African continent ensured substantial union influence in the early years of the movement – wages increased dramatically in response to union growth (Fallon 1992, p. 18). But labour influence has declined as changes in the workplace have reduced employer reliance on it – less and less of the economically active population are absorbed into the formal labour market (Bhorat and Oosthuizen 2006). This has potentially profound implications for redistributive politics, since it means that the unions represent a declining percentage of working people. In the Western Cape province, traditionally the home of the garment industry, women who once worked in mass-production clothing plants now work from home in cut-make-and-trim piecework operations (Rogerson 2001). When they worked in factories, they could withdraw their labour and force the employer to negotiate. Now, if they do not produce, they sacrifice income and leave the clothing companies free to purchase from another supplier. More generally, the poor are now increasingly outside the formal workplace and so beyond the reach of traditional forms of labour organisation. This may explain why the unions, while they have been able to secure a labour relations regime which does meet many union demands, have failed to secure the changes in the economic policy framework which they have demanded (COSATU 2011) – strength in the workplace does not translate into equivalent strength in the society. A more effective redistributive politics will require the emergence of a new coalition in which unions will play a role, but only in alliance with other organisations representing the poor outside the formal labour market.
Because many poor people are now beyond the reach of the trade unions, it follows that an effective redistributive politics will require the organisation of the millions of people who are excluded from the formal workplace and thus from the labour movement. It is here that social movements become crucial to the analysis, for they would seem to be the obvious modes of organisation for citizens who live in poverty but are unable to participate in the formal economy and so to join the labour movement. Are South African social movements the bearers of a new politics of redistribution? Do they provide the collective voice for poor people which the labour movement once offered? And have they a reasonable prospect of winning shifts in the redistribution of power and resources? The next two sections will attempt to address these questions. They will rely on empirical research by this author and colleagues into one such movement, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (Friedman and Mottiar 2005, Friedman 2010) and on published research on current social movements.
Changing the system or joining it? Social movements in a democratic society
The emergence, some six years after the defeat of apartheid, of social movements which responded to the persistence of social and economic inequalities in a democratic South Africa, was a development of great importance to intellectuals on the left.
In 1996, the ANC-led government adopted the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR), which was seen by many activists and intellectuals as a retreat from redistributive politics (Michie and Padayachee 1998, Habib and Padayachee 2000). Prior to GEAR, ANC policy had been underpinned by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), initiated by the union movement in an attempt to hold the first universal-franchise government to a redistributive agenda. GEAR's stress on tight fiscal policies was seen as evidence that the ANC had abandoned social justice for neoliberalism. In reality, the version of the RDP which the ANC adopted after a lengthy internal negotiation was far less redistributive, and government policy after GEAR was far less neoliberal' than this view suggested (Masiza and Ngqungwana 2001). But the failure of the post-apartheid government to launch an effective assault on poverty was widely blamed on GEAR.
The emergence of social movements seemed to show that the government's policy direction was being fiercely resisted by the poor and that the critics had been correct to insist, in the face of frequent government protestations, that the policy shift represented a war against poor people, who were now fighting back. The social movements were thus the focus of much scholarship (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006, Desai 2002) which welcomed them as a new departure in South African politics. One scholar and activist hailed them as vehicles of ‘a socialist vision, and an independent mass-based mobilisation and struggle as an ideological and organisational alternative to the capitalist ANC’ (McKinley 2004a). Other writers make less grand claims on behalf of the movements, but still see them as motors of an attempt to change social power relations. Thus the movements have been defined as ‘politically and/or socially directed collectives … focused on changing one or more elements of the social, political and economic system…’ (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006, p. 3).
There are significant differences between movements – they range from small activist groups to national organisations, from local initiatives to affiliates of international organisations (Ballard, Habib, Valodia and Zeurn 2005, p. 628). There was also initially a strategic divide between movements. Two of them – the TAC and the Homeless People's Federation – adopted a similar strategy to the trade union movement: they sought to engage with the new government and other power-holders to win concrete gains on behalf of their constituency. TAC was unique among the movements in its leaders' expressions of loyalty to the ANC (if not to its current leadership and practices) (Friedman and Mottiar 2005). The other movements were concerned to articulate an alternative voice rather than to win specific demands – either because they saw themselves as harbingers of a new social order (McInnes 2005) or because they found engagement with the authorities futile (Desai 2002). In some cases, they sought to subvert the system rather than engage with it – by, for example, reconnecting the electricity of people disconnected for non-payment (Egan and Wafer 2005). But what the movements have held in common is a rejection of government social and economic policy and a demand for redistribution.
Again with the exception of TAC, the new movements defined themselves in opposition to the ANC. In this, they seemed to be filling two gaps. First, while grass-roots movements which challenged the prevailing distribution of wealth had played a role in the fight against apartheid, both the movements and their leaders worked with the ANC-led government elected in 1994 and did not challenge it. The new movements revived the oppositional politics of the fight against apartheid, often using the same tactics (Ballard, Habib, Valodia and Zeurn 2005). Second, they were seen as vehicles for concerns which trade unions will not or cannot address (partly because the alliance between COSATU and the ANC initially tempered the union movement's militancy). Thus one study asserts that the emergence of social movements filled a gap created by the failure of trade unions to ‘lead the struggle against neoliberal globalisation’ (Buhlungu 2006, p. 69). In this view, unions were ‘slow in responding to the challenge’ posed by the switch to GEAR and ‘it was in this context’ that social movements emerged. These factors ensured that the movements were seen as radical alternatives to an ANC administration which was said to have abandoned redistributive goals.
The expectation that the movements would lead a powerful successful assault on economic and social power relations has not been vindicated (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006, pp. 397–417). Some have won significant gains – the TAC's success in winning a comprehensive AIDS policy is the best-known example (Friedman 2010). These have invariably been a result of using the post-apartheid democratic system rather than confronting it. And, while many of the movements initially lacked a social base – they were usually started by activists and intellectuals who found it difficult to build a grass-roots membership – grass-roots support has grown (Birkinshaw 2009). But the gains have been modest, only rarely have they stemmed from mass mobilisation and the membership remains a fraction of those eligible to join – TAC at its height boasted some 12,000 members while over 5 million people are believed to be living with AIDS (Friedman 2010, p. 46). Social movements have played at best a marginal role in protests which have, since 2004, been a constant feature of life in the areas in which the black poor live. A sign of the reduced expectations which now attach to the movements is the insistence of the academic supporters of social movements that they should now be seen not as an attempt to change the social order but as vehicles which allow the poor to cope with it.1
This limited impact does not, however, exclude the possibility that the movements do play the roles once played by the labour movement – organising and mobilising poor people to claim a say in decisions and thus the means to alter the distribution of resources as well as power. They could be playing that role but without appreciable success thus far: the labour movement endured years of limited influence before its growth period (Friedman 1985). While trade unionists challenge the claim that they have ceded their role to social movements, it does seem fair to assume that movement activists do believe that they are rallying the unemployed poor behind demands for changes to the social and economic system (and thus are playing a role which trade unions cannot play).
This begs two questions. The obvious one, to which we will return, is whether social movements really do what they hope to do and whether they may be capable of doing so more effectively in future. The less obvious one, which needs to be addressed now, is whether the people who participate in them believe that the movements are mobilising to challenge prevailing power. The question is more complicated and more important than it may seem. Like unions, social movements attract the interest and sometimes the involvement of intellectuals and activists seeking a new social order – they equally invariably attract members who are simply hoping to improve their personal circumstances.2 And, while movement intellectuals might see them as vehicles for wide-ranging social change, members may seem them purely as a means to bring grievances to the attention of authorities. Thus Andile Mngxitama, then of the Landless People's Movement (LPM), argued during the period when the movements were still a new phenomenon that the belief among some activists that participants in social movements share their leftist perspectives substantially overstates their ‘revolutionary’ impulse: ‘a LPM leader explained recently to the disappointment and chagrin of the “revolutionary left”: “We want the government to listen to us”’ (Mngxitama 2004). This raises obvious questions about the role of movements: are they challenges to what one scholar calls the ‘hegemonic framework’? (Greenberg 2006, p. 145). Whatever the hopes of their architects, are they about redistributing power and privilege or simply about obtaining for participants a greater share of that which the prevailing distribution makes available? Are social movements, despite their lionisation by left intellectuals as attempts ‘to construct a future society in the decay of the old’ (Bond 2004), merely vehicles for citizens who have no quarrel with the status quo but who hope to gain access to land, housing, medication or public services?
It is important to stress what is at stake here. The problem is not the perennial concern among some on the left that ‘reformism’ – campaigns for incremental changes in policy and law – will reinforce an exploitative system by obscuring the root causes of domination. This is a profound misunderstanding of the processes by which power and wealth are redistributed. The last decades of apartheid showed how incremental reforms which entail even a seemingly small shift of decision-making power from the dominator to the dominated are important steps forward for the dominated because they create new sources of power which can be used to fight for a further redistribution of power. The key test was thus not whether a reform changed the system but whether it required, in however seemingly minor a way, a shift in power (Friedman 1985, 1986, 1987). This holds not only for overtly authoritarian systems such as apartheid but also for formal democracies (such as post-apartheid South Africa). Thus John Hoffman has argued that emancipatory projects which assume that human progress can be achieved only by the destruction of what exists have repeatedly enslaved rather than freed humanity because they have misunderstood the way in which sustainable redistributions of power occur. Hoffman pleads for a return to the dialectical notion of transcendence in which the new both preserves and supersedes the old, preserving that which is still of value while transcending that which is not. Integral to this view is the notion that victories against domination are achieved in the present, not some mythical future, and that structural change is a result not of a violent break with the past but with the incremental shifts in power which restrict domination and open new horizons to the dominated. Hoffman thus proposes that a ban on smoking in public places is a step towards Utopia because it forces participants in the market to take into account human needs and is thus a contribution towards ‘a gradual process of making the exchange process more and more concrete so that real people replace the abstract individuals of the market’ (Hoffman 2009, p. 92).
The problem is not, therefore, that social movement members may demand changes which shore up the system. It is that they may demand no changes at all and might prefer to use the movements to extract resources from the system. It is not that they may seek only modest changes, for even those changes can shift power relations in favour of the powerless. It is that they will seek special favours for themselves rather than rights and entitlements which are available to all citizens or to all members of a class of citizens. This is not yet a real problem for social movements – their demands at present suggest that they are not simply seeking to obtain a larger slice of the cake for participants but are seeking to establish rights which are in principle available to all. And, where changes have been won – by TAC, for example – the resulting entitlements are available to all who meet explicitly stated criteria, not only to those who belong to TAC and are connected to it. But it could become a problem if movements are not alert to the need to ensure that a campaign for greater inclusion does not degenerate into a vehicle for privileged access for a relatively small group of participants.
Tensions between participants' immediate goals and the wider proclaimed aims of movements can also entail important practical consequences: while movement activists may want the organisation to address broader campaigns for social change, participants may feel that this wastes time and resources which could be devoted to their primary concerns. To illustrate: TAC's interest in a people's health campaign which would have sought a public health system more accessible to the poor did not become a reality and it seems reasonable to assume that the reason was that participants' priority was securing antiretroviral treatment, not the broader systemic issue of a better health system (Friedman and Mottiar 2005). Trade unions faced similar dilemmas during their growth phase and the result was usually that campaigns which sought to tackle broader issues were not pursued because of the pressure of addressing members' needs for better pay and work conditions (Friedman 2010).
TAC has won changes in policy which have thus far eluded most other movements. This means that it has been forced to face choices which others can still avoid: whether it should concentrate purely on ensuring treatment for its members or insist on wider access and whether it should be content with securing treatment for people living with AIDS or should pursue wider social change. On the first, it has, as noted earlier, avoided becoming an exclusionary lobby. On the second, its successful campaign for a comprehensive treatment regime has not been a springboard to wider change – it has, rather, meant the organisation's decline as a national actor.
The tensions discussed here pose significant challenges for movements. They warn of limits on their capacity to campaign for wider social changes and of a need to ensure that campaigns for change do not become vehicles for patronage. But, in itself, the fact that participants join and take part in social movements because they want concrete changes in their lives rather than a new social order does not limit their potential to secure structural changes. In the main, this is why powerless people have always joined movements –the labour movement began with a successful campaign for an eight-hour day (Roediger and Foner 1989). As Hoffman points out, winning the immediate gains which participants seek can achieve momentum towards structural change. This is precisely the way in which trade unions were able to build a very distinctive social movement from seemingly mundane battles over pay and work conditions.
This initial clarification enables us to move to an assessment of the degree to which social movements are becoming a vehicle for the organisation and mobilisation which enables participants to turn 1994's formal promise of a say in decisions into reality. Two issues are important. First, the degree to which participants are able to exercise voice within these organisations. The degree to which the poor gain a voice does not only hinge on whether the organisations to which they belong win gains; if gains are to demonstrate widening participation in public decisions and, therefore, an expansion of the right to decide, they must have been freely chosen and fought for by those who belong to the organisations which win the gains (Robinson and Friedman 2007). Clearly, however, exercising voice within a movement is of limited value unless its expression effects concrete changes. The extent to which organisations win gains – or use strategies which may reasonably be expected to win them in the future – is therefore a crucial second test of the degree to which social movements are extending citizenship and empowering participants.
Intellectual fad or structural shift? Assessing social movements
One trade union role which social movements clearly have not taken over is mass organisation and mobilisation. Membership figures of social movements are often hard to come by. Those which are available suggest that membership is counted in thousands rather than tens of thousands. The Landless People's Movement has claimed 20,000 members. By its own estimation, there are more than 26 million landless people (Landless People's Movement 2004). TAC's limited membership was mentioned earlier. More recently, a study of the Western Cape women farm workers' movement Sikhula Sonke reports that it has 5000 members (White 2010). It can, therefore, safely be assumed that membership of social movements is a fraction of the almost two million people who belong to COSATU (Naidoo 2010). This comparison is distorted to some extent by the reality that unions are able to rely on ‘closed shop’ or ‘union shop’ agreements in some workplaces which automatically make all workers union members. But this makes a relative difference only; it is safe to assume that voluntary membership of trade unions far exceeds that of social movements, making the unions rather than the movements the prime source of mass mobilisation in the society.
Social movement activists and some of their academic supporters are critical of a ‘numbers game’ in which support and strength are simply equated with membership numbers.3 They are right to warn again a mechanistic relationship between numbers and power in which the former is said directly to translate into the latter. If power required mass support, TAC would not have won a comprehensive government response to AIDS. It is also far easier for unions and professional associations to recruit dues-paying members and retain accurate records of how many they have than it is for social movements. But, while a more nuanced view of membership numbers is appropriate, this does not mean that these numbers are irrelevant: claims to be ‘mass-based’ require a mass membership base and the number who join is an important indicator of a movement's ability to speak for people. As long as social movements speak of a few thousand at most, they cannot be seen as the primary vehicles for political participation of the poor and weak.
As noted above, the limited support base of social movements is also demonstrated by the fact that they have played a minor role in six years of sustained urban protest and have failed to turn the discontent which prompts the protests into a major organising opportunity. Some analyses insist that social movements have played a key role in leading the demonstrations (Shoba 2007). However, a parliamentary investigation of the protests insisted that ‘political factionalism’ was a key cause (Parliament of South Africa Research Unit 2009), a view repeated frequently by local and provincial politicians who attribute the protests to politicians who mobilise grass-roots citizens in the hope of strengthening their position in local politics. A recent study of the protests suggested that ‘many gatherings were probably local political protests’ (Alexander 2009) – in contrast, presumably, to actions organised by movements. Available evidence suggests that social movements have led some protests (Gwala 2010) – a trend which has increased as the wave of protests has continued. But there is no evidence to suggest that movements have led much more than a fraction of this vast wave of demonstrations which, in the financial year 2004–5 alone saw, according to official figures, 5085 legal and 881 illegal actions by protestors (Masondo 2010).
While the role of movements in leading the protests is open to debate, what is far clearer is that the demonstrations have not prompted a dramatic growth in the organisation of the urban poor or a consequent shift in the distribution of power in the cities. It remains likely that participation in social movements has increased since the protests began. What the protests have not done, however, is to prompt a sustained increase in the capacity of the urban poor to gain a say in urban decisions. Some have prompted attempts to negotiate and thus to gain a say: protesters have handed in memoranda to the authorities (Alexander 2009) and have on one occasion successfully mobilised to remove a mayor from office (Grootes 2009). But there are few, if any, examples of residents achieving a share in urban decision making by negotiating on grievances with the authorities.
This point is of paramount importance, for it was by channelling collective action initiated at the grass roots into permanent transfers of power that the union movement grew. As labour militancy increased, industrial action was not organised by unions – but it was the unions who stepped in to ensure that the gains were turned into organisation (Friedman 1985). This is not only the key to organisational growth. It is also the means by which the expression of grievance turns into power to participate in decisions. Union members became more impatient for change than other citizens (Charney 1995) because they were able to exercise power and this gave them the confidence to demand more. If movements cannot build on the grass-roots expression of grievance to achieve sustained shifts in social power through organisation and negotiation, it is hard to understand how they will be able to ensure that the poor gain a significant say in decisions. This point was demonstrated in the urban context in far less favourable circumstances during the township battle against apartheid during the 1980s when, beginning in the village of Port Alfred in the Eastern Cape province, local civic activists forged negotiating relationships with the authorities or with business which gave them a share in decisions and in some cases enabled them to exercise joint decision-making power despite the fact that apartheid denied those who participated in them elementary citizenship rights (Suttner 2004). Thus far, this has been beyond the social movements – for as long as it remains so, it is difficult to see them making a sustained impact on the environments in which the South African poor live.
This raises another key observation about social movements – that they have largely failed to win concrete gains for their participants. TAC's victories are, of course, an exception. More recently, the shack-dweller movement Abahlali baseMjondolo won, in late 2009, a constitutional court order striking down Section 16 of the Slums Act (Abahlali baseMjondolo 2009). Abahlali baseMjondolo has also won small gains for members – taps or toilets in shack settlements (Birkinshaw 2009). This reflects a new departure in the strategies of some movements: the neat distinction between organisations which use the system and those who do not, which was largely accurate when the movements emerged, has become less tenable. Abahlali baseMjondolo combines use of the courts with an electoral boycott – it has sought to persuade shack dwellers in its Durban base not to vote in local elections – a tactic pioneered by the Landless People's Movement in 2004. In her study of the farm workers' movement Sikhula Sonke, White points to some concrete gains made in engagement with employers and government officials (White 2010, 682 ff.). But, in the main, social movements have not achieved concrete changes to law, policy and practice for their participants. This means that they are, in the main, not vehicles for citizens to acquire a greater voice because voice means the capacity to translate demands into concrete change.
Social movements and academic authors sympathetic to them may reply that this was not one of the goals of the movements: they were concerned not to win concrete changes but to act as ‘alternative avenues for democratic expression’(McKinley 2004b, p. 12) outside those forms offered by the formal political system or as mobilisers of an alternative socialist vision (McKinley 2004a, Buhlungu 2006, Oldfield and Stokke 2006). On both of these grounds, most movements did not seek negotiation with the authorities – indeed, they often saw it as an unacceptable compromise. TAC was treated with suspicion partly because it did seek gains through engagement with the public authorities. Concrete changes are won in engagement with official instruments of governance (including the courts); many of the movements are suspicious of this engagement and so do not achieve the changes which go with it. To judge the movements by whether they win concrete changes, in this view, is to use a standard which cannot appropriately be applied to them.
There are two answers to this point. The first is that, as noted above, the abstentionist position described here has eroded and it is now increasingly common for social movements to seek to use negotiation with the authorities and, in some cases, court action (Abahlali baseMjondolo 2010, Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign 2009, 2010). So it is becoming increasingly inaccurate to see the movements' failure to achieve concrete gains as a product of principle. The second is that the history of both the trade union movement and social movements such as TAC shows convincingly that the abstentionist position is a recipe for powerlessness and that, to the extent that social movements embrace this stance, they will remain marginal to the concerns of most poor people. It was the unions which won gains which grew and became vehicles for organised militancy. The key obstacle to a fairer distribution of the right to make decisions as well as access to resources is the powerlessness, real and perceived, of the poor. By winning demands, even very immediate ones which seem not to alter the nature of the system, movements enable participants to gain a sense of their power, which enables them to expand both their demands and their willingness to fight for them. People who see themselves as powerless and who are drawn to organisation by the scale of their immediate need are very unlikely to stay long in movements which offer them the prospect of perpetual struggle but no concrete change.
Some analyses insist that social movements are deepening democracy despite their lack of gains because they give members a means of participating in their organisation (McKinley 2004b, p. 12). Internal democracy is essential if movements are to offer a vehicle for voice, a point made earlier. What is less clear is whether the movements are as democratic as some of their advocates insist. Thus, Ballard, Habib and Valodia, in their much-cited study of social movements, point out that the movements differ in their embrace of democratic practices, implying that particular movements cannot be assumed to practise internal democracy: whether or not they do must be empirically established in each case. They note also that ‘in all cases … a vanguard cadre play a crucial role’ (Ballard, Habib and Valodia 2006, p. 407). Pithouse devotes a significant section of an analysis of social movements to repeated warnings against elite capture (Pithouse 2006), a theme which would not be necessary if this was not a concrete threat. Work on TAC suggests that while democratic structures are operating, dynamics which privilege elite voices are ever present (Friedman and Mottiar 2005). Whether movements do indeed give their grass-roots participants a voice depends, therefore, on a set of highly contingent circumstances. And even where movements are democratic, strategy may continue to be largely the work of middle-class intellectuals.
Equally importantly, the notion that participation in associations which do not achieve any concrete gains for their participants – and which therefore do not enable them to alter the power relationships to which they are subject – has automatic democratising qualities misses the point. The poor and marginalised are excluded from democratic participation by unequal power relations and they can be said to be participating – and thus to be wielding power – only if they are able to acquire a share in the decisions which have hitherto been made about them and not with them. Ironically, the implied claim that participation in ‘struggle’ can offer a viable means of democratic participation even in the absence of concrete gains which shift the distribution of power has much in common with the position of Robert Putnam, who has argued that participation in apolitical associations such as choral societies equips citizens with the experience they need to become democratic citizens (Putnam 1994). Despite their differences, both views ignore the reality that it is not participation in voluntary associations which deepens democracy – whether these are football clubs or social movements – but collective action to hold power to account. Associations which do not offer the powerless a means to begin to wield power are not instruments of deeper, more inclusive democracy because they do not address the chief constraint to democratisation – a distribution of power which reduces the poor to the objects of others' decisions rather than the subjects of their own destiny.
It is perhaps worth noting that a more thorough democratisation of social movements might, given the points made earlier about the expectations of participants rather than leaders, ensure that the movements became more focused on immediate gains and more pragmatic in their dealings with government authorities and perhaps private power-holders too – the current trend within movements to greater engagement with official institutions may reflect the extent to which both the quantity and quality of grass-roots participation is growing. Movement intellectuals may resist the notion that democracy is about winning a say in decisions from which concrete gains can be made, but the evidence suggests that grass-roots participants are under no such illusions. If social movements do begin to develop authentic mass bases and effective internal democracy, a greater focus on using whatever levers the democratic system has to offer to win immediate gains seems the likeliest result.
None of the criticisms argued here should be interpreted to mean that social movements are little more than an irrelevance given an inflated importance by the desire of left intellectuals to find a vehicle. The movements obviously differ in a great many ways – not only in their internal organisation but also in their levels of organisation, their support base, their ability to mobilise and their tactics and strategy. But all provide a vehicle for people who, without them, would be deprived of the right to participate in democratic politics, to seek to exercise the active citizenship to which democracy entitles them. Some of the movements – TAC in its successful fight for antiretrovirals, Abahlali baseMjondolo in its challenge to the Slums Act, and the other movements which have enabled members to challenge decisions which affect them but in which they had no part – are making South African democracy more inclusive by providing for thousands of people the means of collective action without which democratic rights remain a promise rather than a reality. Not only is South Africa more democratic than it would be if there were no social movements – given the constraints on workplace organisation in the formal economy discussed earlier, it seems probable that, if poor citizens are to claim a stake in decision making, it will be through the efforts of social movements (if not necessarily those movements which currently exist).
What the argument has sought to show is that the movements are not providing an organisational nexus which offers a realistic prospect of a shift in power and privilege. Despite changes which have weakened unions here, the South African union movement remains unusually large and influential in comparison to similar movements in most other societies. The unions thus remain a far larger and a far more influential source of mass mobilisation than any of the social movements who operate outside the workplace – and this by a considerable distance. For many years, a South African redistributive politics which does not assign a pivotal role to the trade union movement is likely to remain marginal to most of the poor, as well as to mainstream politics.
But this, of course, does not mean that unions are still the key drivers of redistributive politics. They cannot be, for the proportion of poor people who are outside the reach of the formal labour market, and thus of the unions, is high and growing. If an effective redistributive politics is to emerge, therefore, it will need to move beyond the workplace and thus beyond the labour movement. But what would be needed for social movements to play a far greater role in altering the distribution of power and resources? The concluding section will argue that an effective redistributive politics is most likely to emerge from a social movement–trade union synergy.
Movement unions and union movements: a new synergy?
Despite their shared support for a redistribution of power and privilege, COSATU and most of the social movements do not see each other as allies (Lehulere 2005) – indeed, relations are characterised by distance and mutual suspicion.
The most obvious and most oft-cited reason is COSATU's alliance with the ANC. On the one hand, this makes it hesitant to work with movements which are hostile to the governing party – it did work with TAC but this was possible precisely because its leadership professed loyalty to the ANC. When TAC embarked on a civil disobedience campaign, COSATU withheld support because it was unwilling to confront an ANC government in this way (Friedman and Mottiar 2005). When, in late 2010, COSATU initiated a meeting with civil society organisations to discuss co-operation, it was careful only to invite those which were not hostile to the ANC – and even then, the meeting was denounced by the ANC as an initial step towards ‘regime change’ – as an attempt to displace it with an alternative government (Mantashe 2010). The movements have been more ambivalent about COSATU but a widely held position has made co-operation dependent on its abandoning its alliance with the ANC (Lehulere 2005, p. 21). The divide may go deeper and may also reflect differing tactical orientations as well as divergent views on relations with the ANC. Despite occasional suggestions that COSATU and social movements are willing to co-operate more closely, they have remained rivals rather than partners. Both, however, may face compelling pressures to explore co-operation.
The immediate reason for this may be recognition that a refusal to co-operate has reduced the influence of both. Union bargaining power is undercut by rising unemployment and the growth of informal work – organising workers outside the formal workplace is a task which unions have been unable to address. Organisation is more difficult, bargaining power not as obvious – the styles of organisation which succeed in the formal workplace are often ineffective outside it. This explains why limited attempts by unions to assist the organisation of informal sector workers such as street traders have thus far proved unsustainable (Devenish and Skinner 2006). There are no signs yet that unions are able, on their own, to organise informal workers. Social movement growth has been limited by organisational constraints but movements have acquired constituencies which are beyond the reach of unions, giving the latter an incentive to enhance their bargaining power by co-operating with the movements. An alliance would also substantially increase the influence of social movements. Alliances were always a key feature of union strategy just as they have been integral to TAC's approach (Friedman and Mottiar 2005); some social movements have begun to see the value in alliances (Saunders 2009) and co-operation with unions would enhance this trend.
But more is at stake here than the need for an alliance between organised workers and organisations which recruit members outside the formal labour market. A synergy between organising styles and strategies may strengthen both parties. Unions which work with social movements would become more aware of the importance of organising outside the workplace, the difficulties which this presents and the approaches necessary to build strength in the society beyond the formal labour market. Movements may follow the lead of TAC and the Homeless People's Federation by recognising the power of the unions' stress on winning the gains which participants seek when they join movements. As noted above, there is already movement in this direction among social movements which would be enhanced if movements begin to absorb union approaches and unions begin to acknowledge the constraints of organising the formally unemployed. Movements may also begin to adopt the internal practices, processes and structures which make the unions relatively democratic. Trade union democracy was not a choice – it was an imperative which flowed from the logic of the situation in which unions found themselves: it would not have been possible to persuade workers to remain united during long and punishing recognition disputes without a high degree of internal democracy (Friedman 1985). But it was precisely because democracy was an organisational imperative that it became so crucial an element in the unions' way of operating. Unions were also compelled to develop processes and structures to sustain democratic practice. While the logic of social movements' situation differs, internal democracy is likely to ensure that movements are better placed to grow and exert enhanced influence. Those movements which have demonstrated significant degrees of internal democracy, such as TAC and Sikhula Sonke, have relied on clear rules and procedures to preserve it (White 2010). It is probable that the high job losses of the past two years have removed from the formal workplace union activists who have a knowledge of organisation and a motive to use it outside the formal economy – it may be no accident that retrenched union shop stewards have appeared as organisers of collective action in some townships and shack areas over the past decade.4 A synergy between union and social movement approaches may be as crucial to enhancing the effectiveness of both as the added numbers which an alliance would bring.
However compelling the strategic arguments for union–social-movement co-operation which might be a catalyst to this synergy, greater union organisational strength means that it is unlikely to occur unless COSATU in particular sees a compelling strategic reason to seek alliances with social movements. While some unionists insist that this co-operation is already occurring,5 the evidence does suggest that this shift in union strategy has still not fully occurred. But developments within the ANC alliance could impel COSATU to make campaigning in partnership with social movements a key feature of its strategy. It has, over the past four years, based its attempts to seek greater influence on public policy on a continuing attempt to influence ANC politics: the election of Jacob Zuma as ANC president and then state president was meant to open opportunities for unprecedented union influence. Over the four years since he was elected, COSATU has pinned its hopes of enhanced influence on insider ANC politics. This strategy has yielded very limited results – although the signs that the strategy has been ineffective have been visible for some time, this was brought home to COSATU forcibly during a public sector strike in 2010 during which the attitude of the Zuma government was almost identical to that of its immediate predecessor when faced with a very similar dispute. The result has been COSATU disillusion with an ANC leadership which it has worked hard to elect and to cultivate (Steenkamp 2010).
COSATU could respond to the disillusion by continuing to rely on ANC politicking to meet the concerns of its constituency. But it could also conclude that it will be unable to enhance its influence unless it seeks to build social power rather than relying on insider influence. This would prompt recognition of the earliest lesson of the union movement's history – that power is a product of organisation, not of links to political leadership. One consequence could be a renewed emphasis on workplace organisation in an attempt to build power in the formal economy; another could be an increased attempt to build power in the society which would require organisation outside the workplace – and could prompt it to seek alliances with social movements and to seek ways to strengthen grass-roots organisation outside the workplace. It was precisely this strategic perspective which prompted the 2010 meeting between COSATU and civil society organisations which sought to build an alliance to ‘tackle corruption, poverty and unemployment’ (Phakathi 2010).
The union federation is clearly finding it difficult to make this shift. There is broad consensus within COSATU that its alliance with the ANC must survive – balancing an alliance with the governing party with a partnership with social movements is difficult, particularly given the degree to which the ANC feels threatened by these alliances. Internal differences between unionists who emphasise a continued alliance with the current ANC leadership and those who want to challenge it (Mkokeli 2011) also make it difficult for COSATU to chart a new strategic course, a problem compounded by the fact that some COSATU leaders hope to win election to leadership positions in the ANC. Even if these obstacles are overcome, a synergy between unions and social movements may require COSATU to make strategic changes which it is unwilling to entertain.
If, however, COSATU finds the shift too great, and the union–social movement synergy proves elusive, it is unlikely that an effective movement for redistribution will emerge. Neither unions nor social movements can, on their own and using the strategic approaches of the past decade, build an effective challenge to the prevailing distribution of power and wealth. Only enhanced co-operation between them and a synergy between their methods and approaches can make a movement for greater social equality emerge with the capacity to become as effective as the campaign against apartheid was.
Note on contributor
Steven Friedman is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy at Rhodes University and the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Building Tomorrow Today, a study of the origins of the South African trade union movement. He is currently studying the relationship between democracy, poverty and inequality.