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Book Note
| Ufil' Umuntu, Ufil' Usadikiza! Trade Unions and Struggles for Democracy and Freedom in South Africa, 1973–2003, Khanya Working Class History Programme, Khanya College, Johannesburg, 2005. pp. 102. £13.99 paper.
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| This is an uncompromising history of South African Trade Unions published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the formation of The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) in 2005. The audience is intended to be activists within the labour movement. A large number of dramatic photographs of demonstrations, cultural events and police repression are a feature. The book presents the apartheid regime not just as a political and cultural expression of racial prejudice but as a deeper response to a crisis in South African capitalism, inexorably bound up with securing greater control over the black working class. |
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The analysis of the 1990s is especially interesting with the focus on the move by the ANC, COSATU and other South African Trade Union organisations towards a more moderate economic policy. The text is critical of the retreat from socialism, the rise of trade union-business alliances and the decline of democratic activity within the labour movement. Did the ANC necessarily have to moderate its socialist programme in 1994? Would an avowedly socialist programme have threatened the fragile multi-racial political system that came into being that year, promoting a massive flight of capital? This strong leftist critique suggests that a socialist and class-based analysis of apartheid and post-apartheid capitalism is still vital to understanding the situation of the black working class. |
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| University of Newcastle |
ERIK EKLUND | |
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